First draft done - Now what?

[happygolucky]

Just finished the 1st draft of my second script (first one is in cold storage) :)
I was wondering how to approach the second and successive drafts. A high level overview on various drafts from pro writers here would be extremely helpful.

I am already aware of some scenes that need to be shortened, some entirely deleted, and a few new additions. Also, there's corrections - spelling, grammar, slug-line etc. (Does correction count as a draft or are we supposed to do that every draft?)

Some basic questions I have are -

- How many drafts do you typically take?
- I read somewhere that Guillermo Arriaga writes each draft from scratch. Is that how we are supposed to do it? I thought you makes changes to the existing script in each draft and keep improving it. Typing the whole thing again seems like a lot of unnecessary work.
- What are the aspects that you focus on during different drafts?

Thanks in advance.

[Rolkus]

Me personally, I print it out and review it with a pen and paper - marking pages in the corner that I have altered. I can't have any interruptions.

For my first screenplay, it took me five drafts to get to a point I am happy with - but I could still do more, you can always do more, that's the thing.

To get my mind of one script, I'll work on another - I probably have about 3 in the works at the moment, and another one shelved, hoping to get back to it in December.

[WriteKnight]

"How long is a piece of string?" = as long as it needs to be.

If you're asking what to do IMMEDIATELY - put it aside for at least 3 days. A week is better. Print it out - read it, making notes on the margins. Typos, obvious changes, etc. Rewrite incorporating THOSE changes - then hand it to 3 to 5 people you trust. (Not counting your spouse, family). Get THEIR feedback- sift through it for consistency - do they all say the same thing about a problem - "I got lost in this part.... This character is unbelievable... Why didn't she just call the police?..." Obvious flaws they all hit on. But also pay attention to conflicting notes. "I LOVED the female lead." " I HATED the female lead." - Understand that this can illustrate how a character resonates with a particular reader - reflecting their life experience - not your writing. This is one of the most difficult things to discern when listening to critiques. Obvious typos or plot points are easy to fix, 'character flaws' - can exist within the reader's point of view. That's why it's important to get more than one reader.

Then re write again.

Guess what? It's still 'the first draft'. It's ALWAYS 'The First Draft' until someone buys it.

[WMcQuaig]

Some basic questions I have are -

- How many drafts do you typically take?
- I read somewhere that Guillermo Arriaga writes each draft from scratch. Is that how we are supposed to do it? I thought you makes changes to the existing script in each draft and keep improving it. Typing the whole thing again seems like a lot of unnecessary work.
- What are the aspects that you focus on during different drafts?

Thanks in advance.

The first thing to understand about rewriting is that everybody does it differently. There is no set method for how you *should* do it. The only thing that matters is that it gets done.

How many drafts do you typically take?

The number of different drafts I do varies. One project I'm currently working on I've done about 10 major revisions. I only count something as being a different draft when something major happens. I don't count correcting typos and changing lines of dialogue as being different *drafts*, it would be impossible to count the number of drafts if I counted all of that stuff.

That being said though, I have gotten to a workable draft (something we could move forward with) in as little as 2. So it all varies but the whole point of it is to get to a level that you feel comfortable with the product and all the loose ends are tied (that need to be).

I read somewhere that Guillermo Arriaga writes each draft from scratch. Is that how we are supposed to do it? I thought you makes changes to the existing script in each draft and keep improving it. Typing the whole thing again seems like a lot of unnecessary work.

To put it bluntly...No. That is how he did it. This isn't to say though that there are others who do the same thing or that this particular way of doing it is wrong. I have done it before. I've taken a script that I was 15 or twenty pages into, copied a little 1/8 of a page scene, moved it into a new document and started over.

I only did that though because I felt it was necessary. If I didn't feel it was necessary I wouldn't have done it and that is one of the main things about rewrites. You are the writer, you are the creator, what you say happens within the world of the script. When somebody else comes into this world that you have created, they don't know everything you do. That's why it's good to have other people read it (mainly anyone who can read it objectively).

Your mother isn't going to read it objectively.

Your husband might not read it objectively.

If you have an actor friend who has been doing it for years, he probably knows how to read it objectively. Will he? Don't know.

When it comes to letting other people read your work (for purposes of rewriting), you want to be as discriminating as you possibly can be. I would rather give it to a couple of people I trust to give me helpful feed back, than to let a dozen people read it who know nothing about the screenwriting process.

What are the aspects that you focus on during different drafts?

Like I said before I only change drafts when I do rewrites on major sections or things of that nature.

Major things to me:
Changing the location of a scene (I consider this major because it changes how the characters interact with the location and potentially each other.)
Changing the plot of the story (Obvious reasons)
Changing characters (this mainly goes for adding or subtracting MAJOR characters within a scene)
Changing a character from minor to major (And vice versa, simply put you now have one more, or one less, character to deal with)
Changing the living status of a character (If a character goes from living to dead, that's a big change.)
Changing the plot/scene structure (I consider this one major because it can effect how the story in interpreted by the audience/reader)

Minor things to me:
Changing a character name
Typos
Reworking dialogue (This can change to a major thing if the revision is large enough)
Changing minor characters (Characters that don't speak very much or at all)
Reworking a scene (This is not to be confused with restructuring a scene)


So, you see it's really just a mattering of figuring out how you want to do it. There is no set method, so don't think you're doing something wrong if your method doesn't fit my method or some other method.

Like I said, the only really important thing about revisions/rewriting is that they get done.

[xitomatl]

What WMcQuaig said!

I'm also a fan of printing it out and making revisions on the paper. Just makes things easier for me.

What I do is first draft, let it sit for 1-2 weeks (never less than one week, I find my eyes aren't fresh enough yet), rewrite what I think needs to be done (quite major revisions always happens here), and then when I have my second draft done I send it off to a friend of mine and she reads it for me. It's really nice that I have a friend that I can trade scripts with (I do hers and she does mine, and we're brutally honest with each other - which works for both of us). Second draft works for me because my story is usually solid enough by then, but there's still lots of wiggle room for re-working (meaning, I haven't gotten too attached to the way things are yet). My friend is different, she does her first draft, then sends it right off to me.

I'd highly suggest getting a person like that if you can. We met in a class about 5 years ago, and classes are a great way to meet like-minded people who you can form a partnership like this with. It's infinitely more helpful to me than just doing all my own rewrites without her input.

The time between 2nd and subsequent drafts for me is a lot shorter period, days (and in a few instances, just hours). The barrier has been made in my mind that editing is what's happening now, so it's easier for me to chop and move things around.

As to how many drafts it takes me... anywhere from 5 (lowest number ever) to 12 (highest number ever). I use the same distinction between drafts as WMcQuaig does as well.

[happygolucky]

Thanks a lot guys. That was really helpful. If anybody else has any fresh inputs, please do add to this. Thanks again.

[Boo_Radley]

Put it away. Start a new script. In a week or two, go back to that first draft and look at it with a fresh, objective eye. Start your rewrites.

[nmstevens]

Just finished the 1st draft of my second script (first one is in cold storage) :)
I was wondering how to approach the second and successive drafts. A high level overview on various drafts from pro writers here would be extremely helpful.

I am already aware of some scenes that need to be shortened, some entirely deleted, and a few new additions. Also, there's corrections - spelling, grammar, slug-line etc. (Does correction count as a draft or are we supposed to do that every draft?)

Some basic questions I have are -

- How many drafts do you typically take?
- I read somewhere that Guillermo Arriaga writes each draft from scratch. Is that how we are supposed to do it? I thought you makes changes to the existing script in each draft and keep improving it. Typing the whole thing again seems like a lot of unnecessary work.
- What are the aspects that you focus on during different drafts?

Thanks in advance.


There's no one set way to do a rewrite, even for any particular writer, because how you rewrite a particular script depends on the needs of that particular script.

Some scripts of mine have gone out with little more than a minor polish. Other scripts, I've had to completely rewrite from page one -- more than once, before they were ready to go out.

It really depends on the script and what the particular script needs.

The best piece of advice that I can give any writer about doing rewrites is this.

When you are writing or later, when you are reading a script there is often going to be a still, quiet voice that tells you that something isn't working.

It is often very easy to ignore that voice. You'll know that you're ignoring that voice because thoughts come into your head along the lines of, "There's nothing to worry about," or -- "I'm sure nobody but me will notice," or "It's good enough."

The translation of all of these kinds of thoughts is actually, "Something isn't working" -- and what you've done during the writing is to put some kind of patch on the thing that wasn't working to sort of get yourself over it in the desperate (and almost always mistaken) idea that the patch will somehow hold and that nobody will notice that something that should have been built correctly from the ground up will work with this sort of ill-configured "story patch" instead.

I can't tell you how many times I have, personally, tried to kid myself this way -- and it always comes back to bite me -- because when I show the script in question to people, I'll always get back notes about the sketchy thing that I was hoping (sometimes even sub-consciously) that nobody would notice.

And they notice it. And as soon as somebody says, "You know, that's not really working -- the reality is -- I do know. And I did know. And I always, deep in my heart knew, that it wasn't working.

It just took hearing it from somebody else to make me face up to it.

So it's always much better to listen to that nagging voice. If something is bothering you about a script -- trust me, it'll probably bother other people.

If something doesn't feel as if it's working, as if it's just not coming together, believe that instinct and dive back in and don't come up until you've really figured out what it is that's bothering you and what it is that's not working.

NMS