Late June 2026: 10 Goals Accomplished

It's just about halfway through the year, and I've accomplished another one of my writing goals. That makes 10, and out of my total of 22, I'm almost halfway through in that respect as well. Although, that doesn't mean I'll be continuing at the rate that I was going at. No matter, the accomplishment itself is what's important, and I completed another one!

It's checked off on my little list-- Write 2nd Draft of Script (Job)

The script is called "The Job Share Act" and I had written the first draft a LONG time ago. I think I came up with the idea in 2018 and subsequently wrote it. I had revisited it at one point afterwards and maybe fixed up a few things, I don't think I did all that much, but as I noticed when revisiting the script, the last time that I did any work on it was April 15th, 2021. So, it had been over 5 years!

I've become a much better writer since then, and one thing that I am better at now... is brevity. Still not perfect. When I'm writing anything, and especially with scripts, my first draft tends to run long. I shorten it on the next draft or two. But I'm better at not letting the first draft get too out of control in the first place nowadays. Back in 2021, I couldn't say the same thing. This script, which is a comedy, was 130 pages. That would mean it would be about 2 hours and 10 minutes. And not to say that a comedy can't be 2 hours and 10 minutes, and not to say that it can't be great, but your name better be a name that people know.

I try to stick to around 110 pages for scripts as best as I can. I have a lot that float between the 107 and 110 page length, but some of them get closer to 120, and I am alright with that. Under 120 pages is under 2 hours. Some scripts are just a little longer, and this is one of those scripts. But 130 pages is too long.

I decided I needed to get this script to 120 pages or under. In rereading it, I noticed there was A LOT that could be trimmed. Some scenes weren't as funny years later. Some scenes went on too long. There was one scene in which half of it didn't need to exist for any reason. A lot of fixing up needed to be done. So, I rolled up my sleeves (kidding, it's summer, I'm always wearing T-shirts) and got to work. It took a lot of rereading, planning, editing, etc. But I eventually finished my second draft of this script, and I got it down to 117 pages! Quite happy about that.

Here's the craziest part about all of that. When you look at it that way, you'd say, "Wow, you removed 13 pages. Good job. Here is a tasty treat." And I'd say, "Thank you. That's not technically correct, though. But I will still take the treat. I like treats." I wound up adding quite a lot to the script, because even at 130 pages, it was missing stuff. So, the net gain of pages was -13 in the end, but I removed more than 13 pages because I also added somewhere between 10 to 20 pages of stuff.

I'd never done quite intense editing on a second draft of a script, but this script was written earlier in my writing career and so many years had passed. I had learned so much in that time, it did make sense why the script got such a huge makeover.

For starters, the opening got shifted ahead from Page 1 to about Page 3. It needed way more at the beginning, it had just started with one long scene. That scene got trimmed down, and two scenes got added into those first 2 pages. One character wasn't present enough throughout the script, so she got several more scenes, including one in the first 10 pages. I managed to keep my big moments on the pages where they needed to be. My inciting incident, I still had it on Page 12. The change from Act 1 to Act 2, still around Page 25. But between pages 12 and 25 needed a lot of work too, my character didn't put up enough of a fight in between his whole world changing and deciding to hop along for the ride to change things. I had to add more in there.

The worst part might've been that, at Page 55, I wanted that to be my midpoint. At Page 75, that's typically around where things need to have another big change, and then for that to be the segue into how we move to Act 3. Between the pivotal scenes that were supposed to land on pages 55 and 75... there was not enough They should've had 20 pages between them and they were almost right next to each other. My characters experienced a high and then a low immediately after. I didn't give them, or the script, enough time to breathe with changes. I think I added about 10 pages alone right in between those moments, and I eventually got those moments on pages 55 and 75 like they should've been. Some of that was realizing I had two scenes that happened after the pivotal moment needing to be on 75, and they should've been before, so I slid those puppies on over.

And then Act 3 was WAY TOO LONG. I trimmed down a lot of that... while still adding in some crucial stuff. I'm telling you, I've never made such significant changes to a script. But I knew in looking at this script, it was rough, it wasn't in such great, professional shape, but it had such promise and so much gold in it that I was still laughing at jokes I had written years later. I actually was so proud of how it was all setup and how it came together at the end, that general idea stayed intact. But I did a serious overhaul to get this script to move into the realm of, "Extremely happy with this one."

The basic premise of "The Job Share Act" is that, about 18 years in the future, society in the world, but mainly the U.S. has gotten out of hand. People have seen others achieve jobs that they didn't seem qualified for on a big stage, and got the idea that anyone can do anything they wanted. People chased impossible dreams with no training, expertise, or care to practice or get better at the skills they needed. No one would take jobs if it wasn't their ultimate dream job. So many important jobs were left with no one to do them and the economy was coming crashing down. A president came in with a grand idea, The Job Share Act. This required about 95% of people to work the jobs assigned to them so that it could be assured that all jobs were being taken care of. The year was split into trimesters, so every four months, everyone's job changed... in the idea of fairness.

However, this just doesn't work. Too many untrained people are doing important jobs that they don't know how to do, teachers, lawyers, doctors. And then, some government officials have bad intentions with this. The script begins when we're already two years into The Job Share Act and a new candidate is trying to get elected as president and he wants to keep his predecessor's act going, but a small group of people realize they need to get someone in charge who can abolish this act.

As the old saying goes... hilarity ensues.

One last thing, when I had written it, it was very comedy forward. I also thought it was kind of dark, and I liked the tone. I had entered it into one contest long ago... Dear God forgive me, I entered a 130-page comedy into a contest! But I remember with the free notes I had gotten from a reader who DEFINITELY DID NOT rate this script as being good enough to move on to a next round... they mentioned how the script got really dark all of a sudden later on at the end. I remembered thinking that it didn't feel like too much of a shift, because all along I was thinking of the horrible, yet hilarious things that could be happening in this world that I created. It turned out that I thought of a lot of those things, I wrote in some of them, and I didn't lean into the darkness of them enough throughout the script. The reader was right.

So, I leaned into the darkness more throughout the script... not going full-on bonkers... because I didn't want it to be that. But I definitely wanted some darkness in a lot of the comedy, so I made sure to give it that throughout. All in all, I think it's much better, and maybe ready to be entered into more contests. I'm sure at 117 pages, it will incur less heavy sighs from the readers.