Dispatch from The Quest: Scott Reynolds
The Quest participants have been hard at work pounding out a first draft of their original screenplays, but Scott Reynolds has found the time to compose a dispatch for us.
I’m in the home stretch. I’ve crested the end of Act II and I’m on the offensive heading to the final struggle. All that’s left now is to finish. He said. As if that’s the easiest thing in the world.
I don’t want to talk about that though. I’ll save that for when I’m done. What I want to talk about is the power other people have over how well you perform. The power of competitive influence.
Ask anyone who plays sports and they’ll tell you it’s a no-brainer. The best way to get better is to play against people that are better than you. You gotta wrestle outside your weight class once in a while. That’s why fledgling college football programs put perennial powerhouses on the schedule. Yeah. It’s gonna be a loss. But just getting on the field against a champion is going to raise your game.
Outside of sports it’s the same. It’s great to improvise with other people at my level, and I love it, but I also relish the opportunity to do scenes with people far above my experience level. I know that it makes me listen a little harder, think a littler sharper, and really be on top of things.
I love sitting in a writer’s room session pitching ideas and jokes with other people. There’s an element of competitive camaraderie there that you don’t get just working by yourself. You want to step up. You want to impress. If you have even a shred of competitive instinct in you, you will try harder just to prove you belong in the room.
I mean yeah, we can push ourselves and practice alone and motivate ourselves to do things, but at some point, if you’re anything like me, an ounce of a little friendly competition or cooperation with someone who might be better than you is worth a ton of self-motivation.
This is one of the best things I’ve experienced with the Quest. I feel as though I’m accountable to my other Questers, and to Scott, with this screenplay. It’s not just for me. It’s for them. To prove to them that I belong in their ranks. That my spot shouldn’t have gone to one of the hundreds of other people that also could have gotten it.
I want to prove to Scott that he made a good choice. He’s a pro. He knows his shit. So if he likes my script, if he thinks it’s funny, that’s meaningful.
From Day 1, seeing the loglines my fellow Questers came up with, I was in “okay, I have to step up my game” mode. And reading their pages has had the same effect. “These guys are good. I need to make sure I’m playing on that level.”
Real talk: the Questers writing comedies — their pages have had me laughing so hard I woke up my roommate. The ones writing thriller/horror? I got a legit panic attack from reading them back to back one night. How could I not take that as a personal challenge to make sure my writing was up to snuff? (Which is an old-timey metaphor that I really don’t understand.)
It’s more co-opetition than competition but however you look at it, it’s real. At least to me. Having something to prove, having someone to impress, or even just having a yardstick in front of me to measure myself by makes me perform so much better.
And I like to think it’s symbiotic and synergistic. I hope I provide my fellow Questers with the same motivation for my part, and we just keep raising each other’s skills week over week.
So that was that thing that I wanted to say. Gotta get back to work. Now that most of the Questers have finished their first drafts, I gotta knock out my last 15 or so pages. Can’t let these punks beat me!
Scott’s comments corroborate my sense of what the participants of The Quest Initiative have experienced: A major kick-ass creative adventure. This group of writers has worked together really well and, as Scott notes, have challenged, inspired and pushed each other to write good… better… best.
Four out of six have finished their first draft and the other two, Scott included, are on schedule to hit the original end date of December 30.
As a reminder, what I was hoping to do with The Quest Initiative was provide an alternate route for writers into Hollywood. The initial step is getting that first draft done. That is happening. So far so good.
More news to come… soon.
About Scott: Brooklyn based writer and comedian who bailed on software to focus on writing words that humans could read. Twitter: @scottadhoc.