Time to first draft?

I won't talk too much about my shorterst and longest because so many of them have been rewritten anyway. I'll simply say that a few scripts can get dated very quicky. My latest script has a tiny little town in the middle of nowhere, and cell phones are not available (no towers for service). But then ONE of the characters decides to plunk down the extra money for a satelite phone. And this situation of his being the only person in town with a cell phone is critical to the entire plot.

Satelite phones are getting cheaper and cheaper every year. And if my script doesn't get produced VERY soon, then it will eventually be rendered obsolete.



Moral of the story: if you take too long to write a script, it might be just plain worthless by the time you finish it.

My shortest effort was a short script (not a feature) that took two weeks.

My longest (as far as a COMPLETED script) was a feature and it took me five months.

The last script I wrote a couple of weeks ago was a 107 page feature that took five days. I think that's about the quickest. Not entirely typical for me but when the outline is good, I can write quite quickly. It's never gold but it is at least first draft. This last one has been read and general consensus is a couple of easy-enough rewrites should put it into a pretty healthy state.

Having said that, I have scripts that are still on the go many years after typing Fade In. One script in particular has gone through sixteen page one rewrites. And yes, the sixteenth draft smells an awful lot like the first draft.

Well, the amount of outlining I do depends on the project. I do always create a separate document for each script which I use as a dumping ground for rambling thoughts, snippets of dialogue and things to do with tone, theme, character etc. Kind of like a diary. Some of those run half a page but I've got one that runs eighty+ pages. I used to write them long-hand in composition books but I find it easier to do them electronically now.

Funny thing is, I hardly ever go back and re-read them because they're really more about getting cluttered thought out of my brain and onto the page so that there's space in my head to work on the important stuff. I did that for my last one but I did also outline it with a road-map of scene headers to help find the way during the actual writing. It's hard to explain but if you did it for something like Die Hard, it would go;

McClane lands in LA

Limo to Nakatomi

Holly at the party/meeting Takagi

Argyle and McClance outside - "I'll wait."

McClane at the party - meet and greet

Terrorists on the move

Etc, etc.

The key there is to know what you want to happen beneath those headers. So I'll do something like that, sometimes with more extensive notes for scenes that need it. It really is just a road-map but it almost always fits in with Blake Snyder's Save The Cat! model which just happens to work very well for me. So "McClane lands in LA" would come under "Opening Image," as an example.

Oh, and I do like index cards on cork boards - again, particularly Blake Snyder's Save The Cat! model. I've done that many times now and have never been worse off for it.

I don't believe I've ever finished a script that has had no outlining or jotting of notes beforehand. I don't think I've attempted many either. Even just a little prep goes a long way and if I run into problems during a draft that I can't immediately fix, it's almost always because I didn't plan properly beforehand. VMMV.

Yup. Sounds a lot like me. Sometimes as much as I try, the broader themes and more externalised character traits that ultimately come to define the story simply aren't there when the original idea is born - they're there in my head but they haven't yet found their way to the page.

First draft's always about structure for me. I think once you have a solid framework, you can begin layering in the finer details. I'm not sure it would be as easy the other way round but it's really about what gets the job done for you. If you're getting drafts written and they're getting good feedback then you should do whatever works.

Longest I've ever taken to write a script is around eight months -- that's with a long false start that I ended up throwing away. Shortest time I ever took to write script (talking features here) -- is two days.

That was around ten years ago. In 1995, they'd started production on the New Outer Limits, and I'd written a bunch of short treatments for possible episodes and submitted them -- and they'd all been turned down.

But of the treatments that I'd submitted, I liked a couple of them well enough that I thought that they could be expanded into features.

One of them actually took quite awhile - around five or six months (quite a long time for me) because I couldn't quite get it right.

I did finally, and it was ultimately optioned and then bought by Ocean Pictures by way of Twentieth Century Fox (and it's been in development there for the past decade, being progressively fucked up by countless expensive rewrites -- but that's another story).

The other one -- as it happens, I was in between a couple other jobs and I'd been working very fast (previous script excepted) -- to the point where I could knock out a screenplay in something like four to five days. And I knew that I had two days to spare in between paying jobs.

And I had this treatment already in existence -- and the nature of the treatment was such that I knew that I could expand it just by including action sequences, because that's the kind of story it was.

And I wanted to see if I could write a screenplay in two days flat.

So I did -- and indeed I was able to finish the screenplay -- at a hundred pages, in two days.

What's even funnier about is that -- sometime next week, that screenplay is actually scheduled to go into production.

It took ten years, but I finally managed to sell it.

NMS

WriteKnight said:

Wow, great story NM.

Two days is blazing! Do you recall how long the treatment was that you expanded?

And ten years is a LOOONG gestation! Congrats!

Click to expand...

Not very long as I recall.

Actually, I just went back through my old files and dug out the original treatment -- Dated April 11, 1996. It was just about six pages long -- and looking through it, that original treatment is quite close to the finished script. Main differerence is that the original script has fewer characters -- the final version has several more.

This, by the way, is the premise:

A group of mechanics in an underground police garage come to realize that a wrecked car, brought in in the aftermath of a head-on collision, is actually a chameleon-like predator.


So basically, they all end up stuck in this big underground garage with this bizarre organism that normally feeds on people by disguising itself as a car, sort of like a giant venus fly trap -- they see this beautiful car, climb inside, it seals itself up, floods its insides with digestive juices, it's got itself another meal.

Except one day, one of these things is driving along on the highway, gets broadsided and knocked unconscious and is towed into this police garage. Then it wakes up and finds itself locked in, and like any animal, especially a wounded animal -- it doesn't like being trapped.

So it's just about twelve years from first words written to going into production.

NMS

Shortest length for me was about three months, longest is about six.

I had my own version of Blake Snyder's 'The Board' that I spent a lot of time with before I sat down to write. When I read his book, I liked his more and have since adopted that. I don't do outlines, something about them makes me cringe and my creativity feels siphoned away. It is most likely just a mental block, but regardless I don't like them so I don't use them. The Board can waste a lot of time though, if you aren't careful, but it let's me see everything about my story at a glance and I know before I sit down to write where the holes are and can ponder how to fix them. I like taking the extra time up front to figure it out and then sit down to write it, rather then figuring out as I go or during rewrites. But, I'm a planner and that works for me.