June #4: Announcing July's Challenge (and an LA Meetup)
Showing up on the page and in person!
Yesterday I listened to the latest episode of The Writers Panel podcast, and something stuck out that I wanted to bring to our group.
The host, Ben Blacker (who has a substack called Re:Writing), interviewed David Joseph Craig and Brian Crano (writers/directors/producers of the new film I Don’t Understand You). It’s an excellent conversation with tons of gold, but the piece that stuck out to me was when David and Brian spoke about their writing process and perspective on writing a first draft.
They said their goal is to write 5 pages a day, because if you write 5 pages a day, you have a feature draft in 20-25 days. “It’s just math.”
I love this for obvious reasons. Our whole monthly writing challenge and writing tracking is built around the same idea. You don’t write a movie in one uninterrupted magical weekend. You don’t finish a pilot in one night when you finally have a little time to yourself. In our heads, the finished draft often feels like we just need one big chunk of time to ourselves to push through it all. And when we can’t, we put off starting. The only thing that leads to is a million unfinished ideas.
Writing is a marathon, not a sprint.
5 pages a day is how you actually write a movie, or a pilot, or a book, or a play.
5 pages a day can fit in after the kids go to sleep, or before they wake up, or in a furious lunch break, or in three 1-hour stretches you carve out around washing your car and making dinner and seeing a movie with friends.
If you could write 5 pages a day for a month, in 30 days you could have a new feature AND a new half hour pilot.
OR 5 half hour pilots.
OR 2 hour long pilots and 1 half hour pilot.
OR 1 extremely long feature that nobody will read, but you could cut down and get it there without losing all of your friends.
None of that is totally realistic, right? Not everyone can write every single day, and not everyone can get to 5 pages every day.
Our writing habit trackers give an average of how many pages you finish each day, based on each month. Right now I’m at 1.91 pages/day for June. I wish it were higher, but it’s waaaaaaay better than some months when all of my writing seems to be emails.
And I’d say most people who have been sharing on the discord each day are between 1-2 pages per day. So here’s where we’re going to get our new challenge for next month.
July’s Writing Challenge: Write 2+ pages/day on average.
May and June have been focused on building out a writing habit, using our tracker and sharing to help motivate ourselves and each other. We’ll keep that going and still celebrate the folks with the highest streaks, page counts, hours, etc., but our new challenge will be about getting more pages done per day. Not all the way to 5 just yet. Let’s focus on getting over the 2 page milestone that many of us are under right now.
At 2 pages per day, you could finish July with 62 new pages.
62 pages is:
1 Hour long pilot
2 half hour pilots
1/2 to 2/3rds of a feature
62 one-page short films (I don’t know who wants to do this one, but do you!)
So who wants to join in the July 2 page-per-day challenge next month? Bring a pilot or a feature or anything you’d like to the table. It will probably be easiest with a first/rough draft, but if you have extensive rewrites that could work too!
Let’s start with 2 pages/day and maybe in future months we’ll increase the challenge in different ways.
This will be fun. See you in the chat, and also at the…
LA Meetup - July 1st
For those not on the Discord to see the announcement: our next LA meetup will be on July 1st at Lawless Brewery in North Hollywood from 6pm-9pm in the beer garden area outside. The meetup is open to all writers or all levels, so come grab a beer (or non-alcoholic drink) and talk shop with other Residualites. RSVP Here so we can get a headcount.
If you’re new to Residuals, you can get your copy of the writing tracker here (each month has a tab at the bottom), and you can check in daily in the Writing Challenges thread on the discord server.
Chris Amick is a Film and TV Writer/Producer in Los Angeles with credits including Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, Die Hart 2, Kung Fu Panda: the Dragon Knight, Final Space, and more. He’s currently developing a series with Adult Swim, and his latest project is as Executive Producer on the existential thriller IT ENDS, which premiered at SXSW 2025. He teaches writing classes here.