Here’s an article I wrote on re-drafting. It was recently published in The Reader. It expands on a post I wrote here a while back. Don’t ask me why I’m writing this intro like a robot. I just am.
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It’s the fish that John West rejects that makes John West the best.
Screen writing is re-writing
There’s always a better idea. That’s the simultaneously terrifying and comforting reality of re-drafting a screenplay. It may be that the things you came-up with in your first draft make you want to piss yourself with pride, but in most cases, better ideas lie in waiting. Finding them is the tough part, and it’s what makes re-writing such a bitch.
The difficulty inherent in re-writing often leads novice writers to see their first draft as an almost complete work that just needs some tweaking, a few dialogue polishes and a nice title font. So, they’ll rename their document “second draft” and proceed to “re-write” from there. But renaming a first draft or cutting and pasting large chunks of it into a new document is not re-writing. It’s laziness
Guillermo Arriaga, the innovative Mexican writer of Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel starts each new draft with a blank screen, re-writing his story from scratch, deploying new and sometimes completely different language and structure to refine his work to its essence. Now I know that may sound extreme, but judging from the economy of his whippet-lean scripts, it’s an approach that works. Sure, ground-zero re-writing is difficult, there’s no doubt about that. But difficulty should be embraced in the pursuit of better ideas. It’s our responsibility as writers to seek the best ideas we can, mercilessly, regardless of how much it hurts the think-meat behind your face. In pursuit of them, we must pluck up the courage to kill our babies, not copy and paste them into another family.
Massacring ideas is an approach that applies to just about any creative endeavour. A photographer friend once told me the secret to his outstanding documentary photos was to simply take a buttload of shots and then painstakingly select the best. A copywriter friend said that what she likes about the advertising industry versus the film industry is that it’s infused with the attitude that there’s always a better idea. Yet her friends in the film world tend to get so hung-up on their precious, Big Idea that they can’t see past it. When re-drafting, it’s the ideas you reject that make you the best. Even tinned fish companies know this. But that’s not to suggest your other ideas are wasted. They’re vital, in fact, to your ability to see better ideas. You need to stand on their shoulders to get a good look at the geography of your story. So see your first draft as a foothold rather than something to shoehorn into a story that has evolved beyond it.
(As an aside: I suspect that much of the fear associated with killing off one’s ideas has to do with the laughable notion that creativity is finite. What crap! If you’ve had one good idea then you’ll have another. As long as you believe that, then you’ll always feel safe to take your new drafts in a direction that means you’ll have to jettison an idea or ten that you love. So relax: there will be other ideas, and they will be better.)
The vomit draft
The first draft is what comedy writer/producer Judd Apatow (40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Walk Hard) terms the “vomit draft” – a document that primarily exists to get you to the real writing of the second and subsequent drafts. Andrew Stanton (Wall-E, Finding Nemo) works by the axiom “be wrong as fast as you can”, likening the first draft to puberty – something you have to go through to get to adulthood.
What’s particularly useful about this approach is that it can help you to harness that crazily productive energy and impetus you inevitably get while writing the first draft, without impeding that flow by judging your work too harshly, too early. Just get it down. Don’t worry about its merit.
While that might sound a touch artificial, and shatters the daydream that writing is a skip through a land where fairy-floss trees line the path to adulation, the fact remains that unless you have something to work on, you have nothing. So feed your first draft ideas like you are stoking the engine of a steam train. Burn fuel to get as far as you can as fast as you can. Steam into your second draft with enough momentum to allow you to retire to the club car, and sit down to the finer tasks of screenwriting.
Actually writing the second draft
OK, so the first draft is done. Now what? Well, a simple strategy to moving forward is to take a step, and then ground yourself. Don’t take another until you’re sure where you’re going. That’s the simple key to strong second draft progress - lay down a scene and make sure the next not only builds on it, but comes as a direct consequence of it.
It may be different for you, but for me, this disciplined step-by-step approach is what most distinguishes the second draft from its predecessor. When I write a second draft it really does feel natural to focus on making sure each scene drives the next. Action: consequence. This is the first step to achieving the economy demanded of a screenplay. In later drafts you’ll snip like a barber, but for now, making sure that your scenes drive each other is where you can start to get into the real craft of screenwriting.
The trick to writing actionconsequenceaction is to be unambiguously aware of motivation. Hopefully, by the second draft stage, you’ll have a pretty strong idea of what‘s motivating your main character. You should understand what your character wants and how they’re going to get it. So, when you complete a scene and you’re considering moving onto the next, just pause for a moment to consider things from the perspective of motivation. An unmotivated step is screenwriting suicide.
But of course, motivated action can still be boring. That’s why it’s important to pause after each scene to ensure the next step you plan to take is also the most interesting and dramatic way for your character and story to progress.
Now let’s say you’ve followed the logic-train all the way to the end of your second draft. Congratulations, you’re getting towards half way.
Third draft and beyond
From the third draft and onward is where you’ll start to kill more than you create. You’ll live by the maxim “if in doubt, cut it out”. If you suspect something isn’t right, doesn’t belong, or is repeating as much information as this sentence, get rid of it. More often than not you won’t miss it. If there are elements you just can’t do without then you’ll find other more economical ways to weave them into your story. And that’s the key word here – economy.
Many writers new to screenplays don’t realise that the poetry of film is on the screen, not the page. Our art isn’t pretty when compared to prose. It’s economical like poetry. Our aim is to tell a story with the utmost precision. Our art is to communicate elegantly and vividly, but sparingly.
Writing economically is good craft. It’s also good business. Not only do you demonstrate to a reader (producer, development executive/bureaucrat, studio reader, mum, dad) that you have a handle on the art of screenwriting, but you create practical advantages that help distinguish your work. Some say a screenplay is a love letter to a director. Others write for audiences. But if you’re smart, you’ll understand that there are people in the chain who’ll decide your fate long before your baby gets to Steven Spielberg and the pimple-faced army that invade multiplexes every weekend. That’s why I write for the reader. It takes as long to read a screenplay as it does to watch it, so pity those poor gatekeepers whose job it is to read a pile of (usually bad) scripts each day. Give them a break. Give them a reason to give you a break. Write precise, not pretty.
Here’s an example from Brokeback Mountain by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana:
Jack comes loping in on his bay mare. Dismounts.
Heads for a wet sack hanging off a tent pole,
pulls out a beer, chugs it, looks irritated.
That’s not pretty writing by the usual standards, but it is precise.
The catch to all this economy, however, is that it can be really hard to go back and trim your own sentences. So sometimes I make a game of it. I go through my script looking for what I call “hangovers”. Hangovers are paragraphs with a few words dangling on the bottom line. If you restructure the sentences you can usually shorten them enough to bring those hangover words up a line, allowing you to turn a three-sentence piece of big-print into a two sentence racehorse. If you do this over an entire screenplay you’ll be amazed at how many pages you can cut and how much better your script reads.
I just spent twenty seconds scrubbing through Judd Apatow’s script, Funny People, to find this example:
DAVE from Apple is walking George and Ira into the room.
It’s a giant room that holds a thousand people at banquet
tables.
Some simple adjustments make for a better read and save us a precious line:
DAVE from Apple walks George and Ira into a giant room
that holds a thousand people at banquet tables.
Once you’re warmed-up you can rampage through your entire screenplay, butchering words ruthlessly, applying the hangover logic to every single sentence. Treat it as something fun. Strive to say the most with the fewest words. Be merciless.
Screenwriting is in equal measures a process of thinking, writing, destroying and then re-writing. It’s like farming. You grow drafts only to raze them, keeping but a handful of seeds for a new harvest. You want to leverage all your tools and skills to yield the perfect crop from your plot. You don’t have time to write long-winded mixed metaphors like I have here. You’ve got to lope in on your bay mare ready to draft with craft.
Write lean. Mean. Precise.
