Minor Achievement

I was very pleased with myself on Saturday for succeeding in my effort to write thirty comedy sketches in thirty days. You see, there's this thing called "National Sketch Writing Month", and while I despise fake holidays and the like, I try very hard not to see this as one one those solely because of the appellation. It's just an exercise wherein you try to do what I said: write thirty sketches in the month of September.

It's challenging for a few reasons. It's not easy, of course, to think up thirty ideas that you will be able to bring to fruition. In truth, I was forced more than once to proceed with an idea I didn't entirely love due to the pressure I felt from where I stood in relation to the quota. This is actually a good thing, because you get to see what happens when you override your instincts. Sometimes you're very pleasantly surprised, and it's a way to grow as a writer.

It's also tough just to expend the time and energy that it takes to write that many sketches. It takes me a bare minimum of an hour to take an idea through the outline phase and the script phase. That's if I'm really cooking. That's really not too bad, and from there you start with a baseline of thirty hours minimum. Accepting that many sketches will require more than the minimum, a person with other things to do in their life is hard-pressed to get it done.

The stress and drain of time and energy that those other things in life impose on me meant that I had days where I just couldn't get it done. There was a week-long stretch where I wrote nothing, but after getting caught up in a caffeine-fuelled six sketch frenzy, I never got as much as a day behind and sometimes was a day or two ahead. It remains to be seen how many of the sketches are worth using, but for now I'm just pleased that I got it done (and with two days to spare).