I’ve spent the last two years (between running a couple of small businesses, and bringing up a couple of kids), adapting a story I wrote seventeen years ago into a two hour TV pilot. I finished it. I showed it to a few people. It’s OK, but it’s not blowing anyone’s hair back. I decided to put it aside and start on a new project. Something fresh – one of the many ideas backed up like planes on a runway in my head.

This time I was going to try my hand at a feature film screenplay. It’s a romantic comedy in a big waspy family setting. I couldn’t wait to get started. When I finally sat down and cracked my knuckles at my computer (I didn’t – I would never do that), I began to write, and out popped my seventeen year old story again, this time as a novel.

Am I crazy? My family thought so. But it has been a fun process, so far. And maybe writing my story as a screenplay first is an interesting exercise (an exercise in masochism I hear you say). Maybe. I’m having fun and really enjoying it this time around. I can get inside my character’s heads and add the layers of complexity to the story that a TV pilot screenplay just doesn’t allow.

I do think there’s something to be said for the “10,000 hours of practice” theory Malcolm Gladwell poses in his book Outliers. My TV pilot might just have pushed me over the 10,000 hour line, like a pilot logging flight time.

We shall see soon enough. I’ll keep you posted right here on my new site.

TD