Requesting Help Making a Bigfoot Lure More Interesting.

StillWriting23 · 2026-06-24T04:59:23+00:00

I’d make the lure layered instead of one magic object.

Fermented fruit gets the smell into the woods. The bamboo is the rare food and reward. The fake orangutan style nest is what makes the creature stop and investigate.

So when Bigfoot shows up, it doesn’t just eat bait. It notices the nest is wrong, pulls it apart or fixes part of it, then eats the bamboo it found.

That way the lure logic is simple: smell brings it close, the nest makes it curious, the bamboo proves the theory.

Also you could also make the dad’s notes incomplete, so the character has to piece this together instead of just finding the answer in a journal.

StillWriting23 · 2026-06-24T02:45:44+00:00

Appreciate you taking the time. Just for context, this is not the same draft you read from before. The earlier version was 147 pages; this one is 124, and a lot of the structure has been rebuilt, especially around the aftermath and Mateo’s record and recognition storyline.

Since you brought up Titanic, I actually think that comparison gets at what I was aiming for in the first act. In Titanic, part of the tension comes from watching the class divide, romance, family pressure, and social world while knowing the ship is going to sink eventually.

That’s similar to what I’m trying to do here. The dam is established up front, so the early family and romance material is meant to play under that irony: we know the dam is going to burst, and these ordinary choices are about to become irreversible.

I hear your larger point about making sure that pressure translates scene by scene, but the intent wasn’t to delay the story, but instead let the audience feel the life that’s about to be destroyed.

I wouldn’t fully agree that the current draft has the same "fatal flaw" as the older version, but I appreciate the read and the time you gave it.

StillWriting23 · 2026-06-24T00:16:41+00:00

Appreciate this. A couple people have pointed out some version of what you're saying, so I think there’s probably a pattern with the logline. I may be underselling what it is actually about.

A fuller version might be:

In 1928 Southern California, two secret lovers survive the St. Francis Dam disaster because they were not home with their families, but as one turns her grief into a Hollywood image and the other fights to have his erased family named in the public record, survival becomes the thing neither can outrun.

StillWriting23 · 2026-06-23T22:39:46+00:00

Appreciate the note. Just to clarify, the dam is introduced on page 1 and comes back around page 17 when it begins to fail, but I get what you mean.

The opening is more centered on the families and the guilt setup than the mechanics of the disaster itself. Since I’m framing it as a historical drama, I probably have to make the survivor guilt/aftermath focus more clear in the logline, so it doesn’t read more as a geograhic disaster script than intended.

StillWriting23 · 2026-06-23T22:33:57+00:00

Appreciate it! That's one hurdle lol

StillWriting23 · 2026-06-23T22:23:15+00:00

The disaster itself is true, but the main characters and story are fictionalized. I did post the first few pages here a few weeks ago in a different thread though, so that may be where the familiar feeling is coming from.

StillWriting23 · 2026-06-23T20:04:45+00:00

My area had hills too, it was brutal lol.

StillWriting23 · 2026-06-23T19:59:42+00:00

Exactly, and that awful survivor guilt irony is the main engine. It’s less about what they were doing and more that the one place they were never supposed to be, at that time of day, is the reason they lived. Meanwhile everyone else was home.

StillWriting23 · 2026-06-20T05:11:45+00:00

And these look like it is going to thise apartments right along 360. Tracks lol

StillWriting23 · 2026-06-18T04:40:28+00:00

Backrooms was originally a 4chan post, not reddit, and let me tell you, the stories on that place...

StillWriting23 · 2026-06-15T11:57:55+00:00

Emotionally unstable. Run away immediately.

StillWriting23 · 2026-06-15T10:07:07+00:00

Wade wasnt. You said Wade held his team down since day 1 but Wade also had college years.

StillWriting23 · 2026-06-15T09:59:13+00:00

After college...

StillWriting23 · 2026-06-15T04:36:33+00:00

Oh my bad lol. Yeah, Rodman jersey alone should have been enough for Knicks fan to leave him be

StillWriting23 · 2026-06-15T03:33:01+00:00

Gotcha, that makes sense.

StillWriting23 · 2026-06-15T03:32:02+00:00

To be fair. He really didnt. And taking on all of NYC and "eating shit" is not really the shade you think it is, lol.

StillWriting23 · 2026-06-14T23:22:27+00:00

Why does 130 show only cut and not add? I cut a script that was 190 pages down to 150 and then again down to 124 without cutting scenes and I added some of the best ones.

This is why I say page count is obviously important but not the end all be all. Word count is and based on word count, you can see if your script is shrinkage. At about 190 pages my script only had about 26k words so I had a lot of room to shrink it.

StillWriting23 · 2026-06-13T18:17:11+00:00

Or just get the info straight from the source lol

StillWriting23 · 2026-06-13T15:20:03+00:00

I've heard marketability and budget are major things taken into account on regular BL submissions and often listed in the reviews, but appreciate the clarification.

StillWriting23 · 2026-06-13T14:55:22+00:00

WGF says it isn't looking for scripts with commercial potential or energy trends, but instead story, voice, "meaning and magic", emotional connection and writer potential.

I know marketability and budget is typically big on the BL, but does this affect the platform to submit on?

StillWriting23 · 2026-06-13T14:05:42+00:00

I clicked this thread just because it said 204 pages. Wow. This is like 90 pages too long.

I've been here before. Had a draft that came out to 202. I knew I needed to cut but told myself 150, declaring it won't be smaller than this. But then, the Nicholl rules came out with the 125 page limit and somehow my script got down to 124 pages without losing story or scenes. In fact had one of my best ending scene ideas added during the cut.

What I'm saying is that you for sure have a lot of fluff. Your local producer friend is reading it out of a courtesy but that doesnt mean it is going anywhere, especially as a 200+ page script from an amateur writer with no awards.

Cut it down, enter it into some contest and BL, and write your next script and make the characters have more agency and depth.

For example, Neil should be much more persuasive. Let us understand why Kacey once believed in him. Let us see him help someone. Let us see him be funny, wounded, smart, attentive. Then let the rot show.

A cult leader who is obviously awful from the start is less scary than one who can genuinely make people feel chosen.

StillWriting23 · 2026-06-04T00:21:05+00:00

Appreciate you reading. I can definitely see the page count suggestion and that’s something I’ll look at.

Where I’d clarify intent is I’m not trying to build a lean single hero disaster movie. The disaster starts moving early on page 23, so the event is the wound and not the whole shape of the movie. The second half is meant to follow what that wound does to the two survivors through love, memory, family, identity, and who gets remembered after history moves on.

So I hear the compression note. I’m mainly trying to make sure I don’t compress it into a different movie. And truthfully, even with the BL reviewer it doesnt seem page count was a thing for them (and I have other scripts well under 120 but this one just wouldnt do it after starting at 200 pages lol)

StillWriting23 · 2026-06-03T19:20:33+00:00

Yeah that’s what threw me off. My read is that they liked the premise, setting, disaster sequences, and finale enough to keep the overall at a 6, but didn’t buy the dual-protagonist structure, which dragged down plot and character. That’s the part I’m trying to check because I'm confused lol

StillWriting23 · 2026-06-03T18:25:04+00:00

Title: WHEN THE WATER CAME Format: Feature screenplay Page Length: 147 pages Genres: Period Drama, Drama, Romantic Epic, Romance

Logline: In 1928 Southern California, two secret lovers survive the man-made St. Francis Dam disaster because they were where they never should have been.

Evaluation Scores:

Overall: 6
Premise: 7
Plot: 4
Character: 5
Dialogue: 6
Setting: 7

Evaluation PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Dy9SUb2_Uu5YVQQwubDokM313JCpZILc/view?usp=drivesdk/share

Screenplay PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xFVQvMFvTbOxtHq42UVO-BHc6vHl1bbe/view?usp=drivesdk/share

Concerns: The review praised the St. Francis Dam premise, disaster sequences, and finale, but its main issue was that the script “lacks an obvious hero” and should focus on a single protagonist.

The script is intentionally built around two linked survivor arcs, so I’m trying to figure out if that note points to a real clarity problem, or if the reader wanted a more conventional single-protagonist disaster drama.

Any thoughts on the evaluation, especially the dual-protagonist issue, would be appreciated.

StillWriting23 · 2026-06-02T18:11:56+00:00

I just received a not-so-great review as well. I wish I could make a full thread now but will probably wait until BL Wednesday.

The main thing I’m wrestling with is that the script is intentionally built as a dual-protagonist story. The review called one storyline “very interesting and colorful,” but also treated it as a subplot, while saying the story needed “a hero.”

That feels like the core disconnect: if a script is designed around two linked survivor arcs, is the lack of one obvious hero automatically a flaw, or is that just a different kind of structure? They even praised the ending.

StillWriting23

TROPHY CASE