Drafts

If I've learned one thing in half a century of writing, it's this: you have to be bad before you are good. As a young writer, I was forever starting over. I'd write a while and then decide it sucked, throw it out, and start over. Consequently I might have twenty or thirty drafts of the first ten pages of something. I'd stop when it got lousy and begin again.

What I eventually learned is, This is a very inefficient way to go about it. I learned it's best to burrow ahead, all caution to the wind, and finish the draft, no matter how much it sucks. Because you learn things when you finish that you can't learn any other way. Drafts, in other words, are not supposed to be perfect. A first draft is the process by which a writer learns what the hell it is s/he is trying to write. At least, this is the way it usually works for me.

Hence the current draft of the screenplay. Getting crazy in the second act, and I'm riding with it. Maybe it stays, maybe it doesn't. This is not the time to loose any sleep over it. I keep moving forward and after writing FADE OUT, there will be time to step back and look more calmly and rationally at what is on the page.

Rewriting is so much more fun than drafting because it's more rational, less temperamental. Writing a draft is a very fragile, delicate process. The slightest interruption can kick the seed of a thought out of your mind -- and it's gone forever. Rewriting, everything is on the page. You can deal with it. You can take your time with it. You can fiddle with it and put it back like it was later if you want. It exists. In a draft, nothing exists -- and then something exists. And in the space between nothing and something, you can damn near go crazy.

This draft is much more fun than my drafts usually are. Well, the material itself is fun, is part of it ... and this story came to me almost whole. The middle, always the hardest part of a story for me, is shaping up with surprises and more craziness than I expected, but I like it so far, and I'm certainly plodding onward to the end. I have a good shot at finishing the draft this week -- only about 30 pages to go! A draft in two weeks is just about right for a screenplay if I have the story mostly in hand. Then the rewrites take as long as it takes ... weeks, months, who knows?

What a great day. I hope most of the summer feels this way.