I Wrote 275 Pages in 2 Weeks…By Hand

Here they are — the notebooks. The proof of it all. Top notebook is front-to-back filled with my story. The bottom two notebooks have only parts — I had to find unfinished notebooks to use.

I don’t have the secret to getting massive projects done. I never did, not even when I started the undertaking of writing an entire season of television in two weeks. Truly, though, if there is a secret, I think it’s just gumption. This thing hung over me, and I wanted to make it exist in the real world.

I got the first draft of each episode down on paper. Typing first drafts is not how I roll — I learned that through experience and inspiration from other writers. Neil Gaiman would handwrite the first draft of his novels. Imagine handwriting American Gods…

I should note a caveat. Unlike Neil Gaiman, I wouldn’t fill entire pages with words. Because I was writing teleplays, I had to account greatly for page space and timing. In screenwriting, one page generally equates to one minute on the screen. To account for this while handwriting, I would fold the page to create a margin that was about 1/3 of the page’s space. You can see what I mean with this TikTok I made.

Trust me, it works. Typing compels you to mentally drift, while handwriting allows you to write continuously. Even neuroscience notices a clear difference between typing and handwriting. Handwriting affects creativity and connection to the words. During a committed writing session, I would hardly lift my pen from the page. The words literally flowed out of me. Yes, they were words that will need to be edited — but they were down. To paraphrase Jordan Peele, I was just shoveling sand into a sandbox to make sand castles later.

The funny thing is that I didn’t have an official deadline for this. It’s only the first season. Granted, there’s enough expectation on the project for me to have to get it done — it wasn’t “spec writing,” as we call it in the biz — but there was no significance to the date of getting it done when I did.

So, why did I do it? Why did I spend two weeks at every moment I could handwriting these episodes out, only with intermittent breaks of King of the Hill? Why did I write for hours and hours, going through all sorts of pens and pencils while fueling myself with Red Bull? So much Red Bull…

Oh, and a big bag of Swedish Fish as a reward. Incentives.

I think it boiled down to one thing: Newton’s first law. If I kept the momentum going, I wouldn’t stop. Yet experience has taught me that if I leave something in the dust for a day, another day will pass…and another…and another…to the point that starting again becomes a huge undertaking. I wanted to get the season’s first draft done, and I didn’t want it hanging over my head for months on end.

There’s a Hindu proverb on meditation that I discovered long ago, and it rings so true to me:

Miss one morning, and you need seven to make it up.

I needed to keep the passion of my story alive, and I needed to bring it into the world one step at a time. It was me keeping in line with something I wrote to myself called the “Storyteller’s Responsibility.”

Paraphrased, the Storyteller’s Responsibility is a code that I as a writer follow, a vow to do everything that must be done to bring the best version of a story that comes to my soul out into the real world. Imposter Syndrome be damned. Better writers, better ideas, better everything…it doesn’t matter. The story came to my head, and I need to give it all the justice in the world.

This meant, in the case of my television show, doing a 275-page handwriting marathon. It’s here. My story’s in this world. I’m doing my job.

And now onto step two…