I started doing this with the current draft of my current script. I usually say I'll get something in the next rewrite, but little things just keep bugging me. So I'm going back and making sure all the scenes I've previously wrote are up to par before finishing the last act of my script. This could be my self-sabotage side creeping in, but I do like what I've rewritten and the story is one I really think should be produced.
Re-writing while writing, yay or nay?
I find that I tend to rewrite as I go. My sense is that later acts and sequences are built, foundationally, on earlier ones, so if the earlier ones aren't right -- if things haven't been set up, if I realize later that I want something to go in a different direction, I find that I can't move ahead knowing that the proper set-up -- the proper foundation -- hasn't been laid for what I'm writing.
I need to go back and make sure that the foundation is there, and that it's right before I can go forward and take the script where I want to take it, because often when you go back and change one thing, for the purposes of that later alteration, it inevitably changes other things and those things have to be shaken through the script.
If you ignore stuff like that, or just make a note somewhere and carry through to the end of the script, what you end up with is not really a finished draft but a kind of chimera that has the front end of one version of the movie and the back end of another. Then you have to go back to the beginning and start doing the surgery you need to make the front fit the revised back.
Only by then, those little notes that you thought at the time were so clear, all of a sudden you find yourself saying -- what the hell does this mean, what was I thinking? What was I trying to say?
On the other hand, if you do the fixes at the time - when you're right in the middle of making the initial change, you know exactly what you're thinking, exactly what the issues are, because you're right in the midst of hammering out the story problem and working out all of its various implications. A couple months later, those issues may be a dim and distant memory and you have to try to get your mind back to where it was and piece it all together -- now what was it I needed to change in Act One -- I know I wanted to do this, and that -- but wasn't there something else? Didn't I make a note about it, or didn't it just seem so obvious I was sure I wasn't going to forget.
So as I rule, if I think something needs fixing or cleaning up -- I try to do it as I go. That doesn't mean that when I have a finished script and go back over it, that it may not need a rewrite -- but at that point, I'm addressing the question of a rewrite in respect to a document that's a cohesive whole.
It may be a cohesive whole that hasn't solved all its problems optimally, or that may need a different approach to something, or may have all sorts of other problems, but it will still make sense when you read it from beginning to end.
NMS
My script is almost done, but I'm thinking of changing the locale of act one (there's sort of a fugitive on the run theme in the story). It has to be right, so rewrite the damn thing.
