This past April, Camp NaNoWriMo allowed participants to choose both their word count and their preferred writing form, whether that was a script, short story, novel, poem, or even the back of a cereal box.

Educator Cynthia Garcia took the opportunity to keep alive the spirit of Script Frenzy, a retired program that challenged people to write 100 pages of a script in 30 days. Cynthia hosts two NaNoWriMo events every year at Fairmont Catholic School as an extracurricular activity for students. Since 2010, the participants have grown from twenty to 83.

“NaNoWriMo and Script Frenzy have been the most dazzlingly successful of our projects,” said Cynthia. “Students are engaged with the writing, they are engaged with the project, and they are engaged with each other. They even share their writing with their parents and friends outside school, which I think is terrific, as it makes it that much more meaningful to them.”

We’re rolling out the red carpet to the Script Cabins at Camp NaNoWriMo. This is the third of our guides for all you future screenwriters, playwrights, and graphic novelists. Remember us at the Tonys!:

All great stage productions start with a script: it’s the cornerstone from which the actors, designers, and directors take their cues.

When writing a first draft of a play, it’s best not to concern yourself too much about how it will be performed. It’s more important to get your idea onto the page.

STARTING YOUR PLAY

Sure, Script Frenzy may have retired, but we’ve rolled out the red carpet to the Script Cabins at Camp NaNoWriMo. This is the second of our weekly guides for all you future screenwriters, playwrights, and graphic novelists (Read our feature screenplay guide here!):

Itching to bring your very own Young Avengers to life? Think you’ve got the next Persepolis percolating in your brain? Well then, it’s graphic novel time! By following these simple rules, you’ll be well on your way to becoming the next Chris Ware:

Simple Guidelines to Keep In Mind

Though we’ve retired Script Frenzy, we love our Frenziers so much that we’re hoping they’ll join us at Camp NaNoWriMo. We’ve rolled out the red carpet to the Script Cabins, including weekly guides for all you new scriptwriters hoping for some of that classic Script Frenzy wisdom:

So you’re going to write a screenplay. Awesome! You may be nervous, but don’t worry: you’re not alone. Screenwriting can feel like a mysterious art, but if you’ve ever told a story, you already have the basic knowledge needed to write a script. Just the same, we’ve put together a batch of tips that will make your first draft go more smoothly:

Start Reading Movies

Educator Cynthia Garcia doesn’t just teach noveling or scriptwriting to one class at her school in Fairmont, WV. She brings both NaNoWriMo and Script Frenzy to the whole student body. We always love her enthusiasm and were excited to hear how her April went. Here’s what she told us about the school’s first ever “Frenzy Festival.”

April was pretty chaotic at our school. Between Easter break, spring break, standardized testing, and “weather days” (Fridays off of school to substitute for the snow days we had built into our calendar but didn’t use), we only had a handful of actual school days all month.

Two years ago, I might have figured April for a lost month, but that was before two NaNoWriMos and a Script Frenzy. I knew better. I put up my “Script Frenzy is Coming!” posters in March, sent for my classroom kit, and let the buzz begin.

In middle school, I had a science teacher who, if you didn’t turn in your homework for the day, would make you stand up in front of the whole class and give a reason why. Of course, science was never my strong point, so, at least once a week, I would have to stand and explain where my homework was. Now that I think about it, maybe this was my first brush with creating fiction.

I never went with the classic, “My dog ate it,” but did try to explain my lack of homework with excuses such as: “My soda exploded on it,” “I left it at the library,” or “My mom threw it away”. Those are believable, right?

Anyway, what I’m trying to get at here is that excuses are for excruciatingly boring homework assignments, and maybe work—not for the mad joy of Script Frenzy. And because of that, I admit with a clear conscience that I didn’t finish my script this April. Unfortunately, I fell about sixty pages short.

The sixth year of the Frenzy had a combined total of 20,284 Frenzy adult and Young Writers Program scriptwriters who wrote 356,622 pages from all around the world. We had eleven fantastic Cameo writers, who shared tips about everything from adapting a feature script into a TV show to rewriting and selling a script.

I loved reviewing the Frenzy stats so much that I thought I’d share them with you, too! I’m going to make this a regular practice from here on out because digging into these numbers is just so juicy! I hope you enjoy them as much as I did!

General Stats

For Script Frenzy main:

• 16,358 Frenzy participants.
• Wrote 312,363 pages.
• This averaged out to 19 pages per person.
• We had 1,832 winners, which gave us an 11% win rate. 

For Script Frenzy’s Young Writers Program:

I’m a fan of a wonderful little iPhone game called “Fruit Ninja”. Have you heard of it? I’m sure the majority of you have, since it’s always ranked as one of the top 10 apps. Anyway, to get to the point (or to get to a point) I was playing the game today in “Arcade Mode”. It was amazing—I was slashing oranges, apples, and my favorite: watermelons. Then, almost out of nowhere, the highly anticipated yellow-and-red-striped banana appeared. I slashed it and a frenzy began—the “Fruit Frenzy”, that is.

Suddenly my small iPhone screen was being bombarded with fruit. Combo after combo, my score was growing until I surpassed my high score of 892. After a celebratory mental high-five to myself, I had an epiphany: “Fruit Ninja”, and its “Fruit Frenzy” could be used as an analogy for Script Frenzy. 

Hillary, Script Frenzy ML for New Jersey here. OLL asked me to stop by and talk a little about why my area is so much cooler than… er… I mean, to talk about some of the things we’ve been doing here in the Garden State to keep the Screnzy magic alive throughout the whole month.

Script Frenzy is such a newer event than NaNoWriMo, and many areas (mine included), are really spread out, making it harder for MLs and participants both to feel like they have that same connection with their region, even if local events are less, well, local. I thought I’d share a few things we’ve been doing here in NJ to make our spread out community feel a little more closely knit.

Way back in the day, when many of us were still young and naive, and all the cows in the world were calves, the Office of Letters and Light had an executive director by the name of Chris Baty, and a Script Frenzy program director moniker-ed Jen Arzt. These storied figures came together for this year’s Frenzy as one mega-writing-team, a scripting Megazord, if you will. Taking time from this meeting of their creative minds, Chris and Jen sent us this missive in which they interview each other about first kisses, wooden eyeballs, and the co-writing process so far:

Chris: This is the first time you’ve collaborated on a screenplay with someone. What important life lessons have you learned from working with me?

Jen: Coffee tastes better with a friend at your table.

Chris: Our screenplay is loosely based on an 1890s ghost story we made up involving a vanishing train and a seven-foot-tall murderer with a wooden eyeball. Neither of us knows anything about trains or wooden eyeballs. What were we thinking?

For all of our events, the Young Writers Program lends NEOs—small word-processing computers—to a few deserving classrooms around the country. We love to check in and hear about their progress. Laura Nicholson, the creative writing teacher at Huntley Project High School in Worden, MT, recently told us about what her students have been working on this April.

Who knew that writing a script could be such a hard process? My students chose to write their scripts in groups, since I have a creative writing class that consists of four sophomores, four juniors, and four seniors. Each class group has screamed, cried, laughed, forced, and written their way through a short film or stage script.

Have you heard the awesome news? Axe Cop is going to be a TV show! We’re incredibly excited and super happy for Ethan Nicolle, who created our favorite mustachioed officer of the law. Way back when, Ethan wrote a Cameo for Script Frenzy that was chock full of great writing advice, including insight into how to work with an established premise for a script. Not only that, he shared a few more doodles with us, too. Check all of that out below!

I create a comic called Axe Cop with my 5 year old brother, Malachai. He “writes it” and I turn it into a readable comic book. It’s a fun process and when Script Frenzy invited me to do a cameo article I figured this would be a good place to really talk about the process. One thing I want to make clear before I get into this is that I don’t want to take away from the fact that my little brother has a brilliant mind. He is a hilarious kid and he never ceases to amaze me with the things he comes up with. That said, turning a five-year-old’s ideas into something somewhat coherent is an art form all it’s own and it’s one I really have come to enjoy.

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of seeing Titanic 3D with a few friends. I was a little apprehensive about sitting through an almost three-and-a-half-hour movie that I’d already seen, but it ended up being well worth the whopping fourteen dollars. It was also my first experience watching a movie in 3D (not including Disneyland’s “Honey I Shrunk the Audience”), and although at first I found the glasses somewhat annoying and the effect a little distracting, I left thinking it was super cool!

The experience of watching Titanic again presented me with an opportunity to revisit something that I had first experienced in my childhood with fresh eyes. Even though I was only seven when Titanic was released, I can still remember “Titanic fever” and how crazy excited I was to see it in theaters with my family. With equal clarity I can recall the crushing disappointment I felt when, after stepping into the theater, my sister realized she was positively too scared to see it, forcing my parents to admit that Titanic was probably a “renter” (but not for them of course, they saw it the next night).

Although this was a blow, I didn’t miss out completely because after my mom saw it she spent the better part of the next morning telling my sisters and I the entire story with impressive accuracy; even James Cameron would have approved of her attention to detail. While she was telling the story I listened with wide eyes, and clung to every word. Even now I’m completely unable to divorce her version of the story from the actual film. I’ll never be able to watch the scene in which Jack teaches Rose how to spit like a man without picturing my mom’s ridiculous impression of Jack hocking a loogie. 

I’m having a challenging time writing during this Frenzy and I wasn’t sure why until I had a quick chat with our ED, Grant Faulkner. This year I decided to write a feature that is comprised of four shorts linked together by a river. I thought it would be a snap because in my mind it meant that I would avoid the stormy seas of writing the second act of a traditional script. I was wrong. Every single time I sit down to write I feel stuck, and I can’t help but feel a little defeated.

When I mentioned this to Grant he pointed out that it’s probably harder to write four short films than it is to write a 100-page script because I would have to write four beginnings, four middles, and four endings. Bells and whistles went off in my head when I heard those words. In essence I’m doing four mini-Script Frenzy’s this April. I guess it means that I’m a “superstar!” (Said in the voice of Mary Katherine Gallagher.)

Last night after finishing all of my readings for school I decided to put off writing my script (AGAIN!!) by meticulously cleaning and organizing my bedroom. I live in a very old and extremely strange Berkeley apartment that’s pretty much two bedrooms and a bathroom connected by a narrow hallway with an oven, sink, and refrigerator crammed into it. It is in no way the nicest place I’ve ever lived but as my roommate says, “It’s a one star apartment that we love.” But since we can’t really hang out in our hallway, I end up spending a lot of time in my room so it’s very important to me that it’s clean and comfortable enough for me to eat, sleep, study, and hang out with friends in. But with Script Frenzy upon us, I’m trying to take it a step further by converting my modest bedroom into a chamber of creativity.