John August

QandA

What is a #writesprint?

General, How-To, Psych 101

A #writesprint is a timed writing session. For a set period — often 60 minutes but sometimes shorter — you sit down and focus all your attention on writing.

No checking Twitter. No Googling lyrics. No running to the kitchen for a snack.

Just write.

It doesn’t have to be screenwriting; you can #writesprint a term paper, a novel or a blog post. The important thing is that you’re writing something you want or need to write.

A #writesprint is about showing up. It’s designed to get your butt in the seat, fingers on the keyboard.

When the timer ends, stand up and walk away. You can come back to do more writing later, even another sprint, but definitely reward yourself for having done the work.

You can do a #writesprint by yourself, but it often helps to have the social pressure and accountability of others. I’ll occasionally announce on Twitter that I’m about to start a #writesprint:

If you want to write along with me, reply or favorite or just start. You never need permission. If you want to brag about how much you got done during your sprint, go for it!

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need any special equipment or software? Not really. You can set a timer on your phone. If you’re using Highland 2, the built-in Sprint function will keep track of your words, which is handy.

Do I need to start at the top of the hour? No. It’s convenient but not necessary. When I was writing the Arlo Finch books, I found it useful to schedule two sprints a day, generally at 10am and 2pm.

Can I use a #writesprint to do non-writing work?
Of course! If it’s something you’re kind of dreading doing, but a timer and some social pressure helps, go for it.

Where did this idea come from?
I might have created the #writesprint hashtag,1 but I definitely got the idea from Jane Espenson, who’s been doing these for years. (She calls them writing sprints, which sounds better but doesn’t hashtag as neatly.) And of course it shares a tradition with the Pomodoro Technique and other productivity hacks.

Will this really boost my productivity?
If you’re spending a fixed amount of time at the keyboard concentrating on one thing to write, you’re going to get more accomplished than if you’re jumping between email and YouTube and various news sites. It’s like putting blinders on a horse. It keeps you focused.

How short can a #writesprint be?
You can get a lot done in just 10 minutes of focused writing. Don’t be afraid to set short sprints.

Can I go longer than 60 minutes?
If you’re in the flow and decide you want to keep working past the bell, that’s your choice. But don’t set out to write for more than 60 minutes. The idea of a sprint is that it’s intense and focused. It’s a different energy than a marathon.

  1. I’ve deleted my old tweets, but the earliest appearance of #writesprint is in 2011, which is when I started doing them. ↩

Working as a freelance reader

Film Industry, First Person, Follow Up

On this week’s Scriptnotes, we talked about professional readers and the challenge of making a living as a freelancer. We got several great emails from listeners, like this one from “Zeke.”

Like most people outside LA, I had no idea that people are actually getting paid to read scripts or that coverage even existed. That changed when I took a story analysis course that specifically taught us how to read, analyze, and write professional coverage.

From there I started doing unpaid reading at a couple of places around town as an intern and with the Austin Film Festival. My first paying gigs were with some popular script competitions such as Screencraft and obscure ones such as the Canadian Wildsound. The pay ranged from decent ($30-$40 a script) to downright embarrassing ($15 per script).

My first “real” reading for a company was Paradigm talent agency, and then UTA, who pay more but also require more extensive work (additional character breakdown, etc.). From there, and for the past few years, I’ve been focusing on reading for production companies and, most recently, for premium cable and streamers.

Consistency is the bane of the freelance reader’s existence. I always make sure I’m reading for at least 4-5 places simultaneously, and even then, there are slow weeks with little to no work (especially around the holidays). As for rates, I started with lower rates and had to fight for raises. And that’s a big issue: unless you push the companies to pay more and ask more than a few times, you will stay at the same rate you started with years earlier. I know that for a fact by asking other readers who just didn’t know they could ask for more money.

Being a reader for multiple companies, I have to be on call essentially all the time, including nights and weekends. For example, just this week, I got a request to read a script at 11 PM on a weekday, and the requested turnaround was for the following morning. This is not a rare incident.

Technically, you don’t have to accept the work. If you turn down one script or one book, maybe it won’t change much. But the second time you do it, you risk losing the gig with that company, no matter how good your working relationship is with them. Needless to say, sick or vacation days do not exist. I go to Israel every year to visit family, and I work from there as well. Again, I was never forced to do so, but I have no choice since this is my main source of income.

As for the union, we’ve been having a discourse about organizing as freelance readers, but it’s still quite vague on what steps we could take. A union reading job is much-coveted since it not only provides you with stability, but also a respectable salary, excellent health insurance, and paid days off. I would note that Netflix is probably the company that offers the best pay and terms of all non-union companies who work with freelancer readers.

Finally, I believe that a major problem in this field is the fact that many of us, including veteran story analysts at the studios, often feel somewhat inconsequential. Intellectually, we know this work is essential to the development process of any production company/studio/agency. But it doesn’t often feel that way. And that problem translates to everything else: if readers don’t respect themselves, why should companies?

It’s hard to convince employers to offer better rates or better conditions when most places in town use assistants or interns to read their projects. No matter how good a given reader might be, free labor is hard to compete with.

How accurate is the page-per-minute rule?

Film Industry, Follow Up, Formatting, QandA, Rant

Back in 2006, I answered a reader question about page counts:

Every screenwriting book I’ve read, class I took, and basically the first rule I learned says:

ONE PAGE OF A PROPERLY FORMATTED SCRIPT = APPROX. A MINUTE OF SCREEN TIME.

I know one page of say a battle can last five minutes whereas one page of quick dialogue my last ten seconds if the actors talk fast. So my question is, is this rule true?

I replied that the page-per-minute rule of thumb didn’t hold up to much scrutiny, and offered examples from my own work.

Then a few weeks ago, I started thinking about this question again, and realized there was an opportunity to reframe the question in a more concrete way:

For screenplays, what is the correlation between screenplay length and running time?

I asked data scientist Stephen Follows if he’d be up for tackling this question. He jumped into action, gathering 761 feature screenplays and comparing them to the running times of their finished films. Today, he published his findings.

The results largely match what I expected, and what I wrote in 2006:

The one-page-per-minute rule of thumb doesn’t hold up to much scrutiny. True, most screenplays are about 120 pages, and true, most movies are around two hours. But the conversion rate between paper and celluloid is rarely one-to-one.1

While Follows finds there is some obvious correlation between page count and running time, the rule of thumb barely works in aggregate but isn’t very predictive for any given project.

Why does it matter? Because too many folks in the film and television industry have internalized one-page-per-minute as an axiomatic truth rather than a crude estimate. Any script that is longer than 120 pages is perceived as being too long. Indeed, some studios’ contracts specify that the writer may not deliver a script longer than 120 pages.2

In order to bring their scripts under this artificial limit, screenwriters waste time making tiny edits with the goal of moving page breaks. It’s pointless busy work.

Worse, the page-per-minute rule of thumb puts too much focus on arbitrary sheets of never-printed paper rather than the words they contain. If we’re worried about the length of anything, it should be scenes and sequences. But in 2020 we continue to treat screenplays as if they’re hand-typed on dead trees, forgoing digital tools that would allow for better security, collaboration and version control.

As an industry, we’re afraid to move to new formats for screenplays because we’re worried it’ll break the page-per-minute standard. But we don’t need to worry, because the rule of thumb was never really true.

Doing what makes sense

Is it appropriate to try to estimate a project’s running time based on the script? Absolutely.

Before a project goes into production, the script supervisor — an experienced professional who works beside the director on set — generally performs a “script timing” by estimating the time for each scene. It’s not perfect, but it better reflects reality. If a script times out to three hours, better to know it before production, so you’re not shooting scenes that won’t make it into the film.

Is there an opportunity for computer-generated running time estimates? Probably.

With machine learning, I can imagine systems that better predict how words on the page will reflect minutes on screen. But I wonder if it’s a false goal. Ultimately, running time is a factor of film editing. Scenes get dropped in post, and it’s very hard to anticipate these changes when looking at a script in preproduction.

This analysis was done on feature films, but every TV show faces similar issues. However, long-running shows have the advantage of knowing how their specific show works. My hunch is that every NCIS script falls in a narrow range of scenes and pages because they know what they need.

Big thanks to Stephen Follows for accepting this challenge and myth-busting this rule of thumb. Be sure to read, share and comment on his post.

  1. Celluloid! It truly was a different age in 2006. ↩
  2. On a recent project, my contract limited delivery to 130 pages. Such decadence! ↩

How to Listen

Episode - 438

Play

Assistants, Follow Up, QandA, Scriptnotes, Transcribed

John and Craig talk dialogue. How characters speak is an optimized version of real speech — but if you optimize too much you risk making your characters feel artificial. We listen to clips of real conversations to pick out patterns and tendencies you can incorporate to help improve written dialogue.

Then we dive into the mailbag for questions on perspective (48:03), submission agreements (51:40), and best practices for non-WGA writers during a strike (55:58).

In our bonus segment for premium subscribers (1:06:56), we get political and discuss the current state of the Democratic primary.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

UPDATE 2-21-2020 The transcript for this episode can be found here.