Okay, I'll step out of my fuzzy, naive persona to answer this honestly.
How do you typically write a screenplay?
- I write the first draft. Throw it away. Then I write another draft. Throw it away. By the third "first" draft, I feel that I know the characters pretty well. My current "first draft" took 1100 new pages to get it to a crispy 116 pages.
Do you outline and write detailed character sketches, letting it all simmer in your mind before starting the script?
- I tried the outline method. But the moment I start writing, I find that my characters don't cooperate with the outline. So I kinda stopped doing that.
Write by the seat of your pants and get the first draft down in two weeks?
- I wrote one script in two weeks. It was very rushed and I didn't really know what I was doing. The script turned out pretty well. And three years later, after going through various revisions, I find that the original draft holds up pretty well.
Jot down a few notes here and there, then write the first draft slowly?
- Now my inner critic doesn't seem to allow me to just write for the heck of writing. I used to be able to crank out 10 pages a day and, you know what, those pages were 90 percent there. But now I'm so fearful that my pages aren't at 95 percen or 99 percent that I cannot write as prolifically. But the resulting pages are, at best, 91 percent, let's say. Also, now that I have an agent and producers looking over my shoulder, it's very hard for me to not second guess if they would like what I'm writing.
So in a way, I miss the days when I didn't know what I was doing and didn't have an agent.