If you haven’t heard of Script Frenzy, you’re about to be informed.

Script Frenzy is an online writing competition that challenges aspiring writers of every kind to write 100 pages of a script during the month of April. Be it a movie, television show, comic book or stage play, Script Frenzy encourages you to bust out your best script ideas and put pen to paper — or more precisely fingers to keyboard — to create a rough script during one month of rapid creative outbursts.

Sounds a lot like National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), right? That’s because the same non-profit — The Office of Letters and Light — running NaNoWriMo runs Script Frenzy as well. Just like with NaNoWriMo, you sign up at a website (scriptfrenzy.org) and on April 1, you begin to furiously write your script. Throughout the month, you update your script count on the website and when you hit 100 pages, you win!

What do you win? According to the Script Frenzy, you win “Happiness. Creative juices. Pride. Laughter. Bragging rights. A brand-new script.” It may not be material, but the prize of having a completed rough draft of a script is a significant accomplishment in and of itself. Bragging rights are always nice, too.

After winning, your script may be very rough and shoddy, but that’s the point. You can’t become good at writing without first being bad. You have to fight through your awfulness and achieve a comfortable level of mediocrity.

There’s an axiom that says it takes 10,000 hours of practicing any particular art to become a master of it. Think of Script Frenzy as a significant deposit of the hours needed to become a master of writing.

Now, I know what you’re going to say: “Sounds neat, but I’m no writer, and even if I were, April is not a good month to be writing in. April has finals.” I understand that finals can be overwhelming, especially at the end of the term when you’re exhausted from all the schoolwork you’ve been doing over the past year, but writing for one hour a day is not an unreasonable amount of work.

You’ll be taking constant study breaks and wasting hours of potential study time on Facebook, so why not put that free time to good use and do a bit of creative writing? Also, Script Frenzy will help you with writing your final exams. How? The more you write, the better writer you become, and a skill in creative writing will carry over into academic writing. Your final essays will be better written. I guarantee it.

Don’t be daunted by your supposed lack of imagination or inability to tell coherent stories. Script Frenzy doesn’t expect you to be Christopher Nolan. It expects you to take risks, flesh your ideas out and see what comes of them. One page at a time your script will come together. And if it doesn’t, who cares? You’ve gained writing experience. Script Frenzy isn’t about writing the next original screenplay Oscar winner. It’s about writing the first script that may put you on the path to the Kodak Theatre.

Adapt your favourite novel into movie form. Write that comic book you’ve forever been talking to your friends about. Pack all your best jokes and sight gags and slapstick into a sitcom pilot. The possibilities for Script Frenzy are quite endless.

Now go download a version of Celtx scriptwriting software at celtx.com (it’s free) and be ready for 12:01 a.m. on April 1. I know you’ve got a story to tell. Script Frenzy is your opportunity to tell it.

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image: Flickr