Writing Timeframe

My fastest for first rought draft was 6 days, it turned out to be 112 pages. My slowest has been, well they're still going. Average is a couple months if nothing pops up and gets in the way. It really depends on the script, how well I know the characters and the story, and how much other stuff happens during the way. Total working days for every script would have to be well under a month, it's the head time that takes the longest rather than the actual writing.

With a good outline I can finish a rough draft in about three weeks. After that things get slow. I once wrote 60 pages in three days, but that was working on an adaptation of a book so there was a lot of existing material to draw from.

Most the time it's probably more like a couple months. But I don't like messy first drafts and would rather take a little more time to start than have to clean up the rubbish later.

My last first draft I wrote in 3 days....but they were 3 months apart. So 9 months.

When someone says it took a year, it pretty much never means they were working on it every day for a year. If they did, they may as well give up, because when you work professionally in the industry, they can expect a first draft in a couple weeks. John August had a post on professional timeframes not all that long ago but I can't seem to find it now.

As a side note, I seem to recall Kevin Smith was given almost 700k and 6 weeks to write a draft of Superman which he wrote in one week (the last one before the deadline) and they didn't use. Oh this business.

I went to UCLA film school, where you have to write a first draft in 10 weeks, so that's been my average over the years (with 17 feature screenplays to date).

My fastest first draft was four weeks.

My slowest, about a year.

I once wrote a TV pilot script for a one-hour drama in ten days flat. It didn't sell, but it did get me an agent at CAA.

zeprosnepsid said:

When someone says it took a year, it pretty much never means they were working on it every day for a year. If they did, they may as well give up, because when you work professionally in the industry, they can expect a first draft in a couple weeks.

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Perhaps they had a full time job/family and couldn't afford to write all day. If all I had to do was write all day I, too, would crank out scripts in a matter of weeks. But when you're working on your own (little) time and getting no money for it, who cares if it takes a year?

I surely don't care. I just wrote it took almost a year for me to write that one script. I think you misread or at least misinterpreted my post.