The 101 Habits of Highly Successful Screenwriters by Karl Iglesias

Author:Karl Iglesias [Iglesias, Karl]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PERFORMING ARTS / Film & Video / Screenwriting, LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Composition & Creative Writing, REFERENCE / Writing Skills
Publisher: Adams Media, Inc.
Published: 2010-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

52. Not Being Afraid to Write Terrible First Drafts

My best writing is done by writing rapidly and with few filters. I then delete my way to excellence.

—R ICHARD BACH

Most professional screenwriters have become comfortable with writing a lot of bad stuff in order to come up with a little good stuff. They often produce thousands of words before one line is fresh enough to jump off the page. To do this, they give themselves permission to write anything, no matter how terrible, because they know it can all be fixed later, thus giving them the power to free themselves sufficiently in the creative stage to write from the heart while silencing their inner critic.

Steven DeSouza: I especially like writing the first draft, which I blaze through as fast as I can, without even stopping for spell checking or fact-checking that might interrupt the flow. And I like the editing part of the printed first draft with my trusty red pen, though I hate all the retyping from the edited page into the computer. On the other hand, I never get depressed about what I write, because I know I’m going to rewrite it. I remember seeing an interview with George Lucas where he talks about a trick he learned from Francis (Coppola), which is not to read what he’s writing until he’s done with it. He writes nonstop, puts the pages in a file, and it’s not until he thinks he’s done with it that he’ll find the nerve to look at his pages.

Nicholas Kazan: You should be able to write a terrible first draft. I used to think of my first draft as simply laying out the territory, and that all the work was done in rewriting. After finishing my preparatory notes, it would take me 32 days to write a script. I’d do a first draft in 10 days, take a day off, do a second draft in 10 days, take a day off, and then write a third draft in 10 days. This gave the screenplay a sort of velocity, but frequently, it also had built-in plot problems. Now, if I smell a problem, I no longer ignore it. I try to solve it before I go on.

Jim Kouf: You just write, blindly putting things down on paper. Just put something down, and then put something else down, because it’s a process of thinking through all the choices. You have to be willing to throw it away. If you write something awful, you just say, “Okay, I tried,” and sometimes you make it all the way through to discover it’s not worth it. You’ve got to write. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes.

Tom Schulman: Silencing that inner critic is important, at least through the first draft, because when will you have another chance to let it all out, if not in the first draft? I try to finish the first draft before rewriting it, and ultimately, I’ll go over it about 10 to 12 times. But I

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.