I enjoyed the Fresh Air interview with Hugh Laurie. I was struck by his story that he spent three days in a hotel in LA prepping for his audition for HOUSE.
Obviously Laurie knew that this was an important audition. But surely, after the first day of going over what can't have been more than a couple of scenes, he might have felt he had it all down pat. Instead he kept going.
I personally have a tendency to spread myself a little too thin. I like to finish things. Lots of things. I tend to be an ninety-five-percenter. My impulse is to get a script to where I'm pretty happy with it, and then write something else while I send the first one around.
And yet I know there's another level. I spent a year and a half polishing and reworking my comedy KIKI WILDER, because a producer kept asking me to rework it. And Lisa and I have spent a year and a half polishing and reworking our drama ALICE FOUND ALIVE, because I'm attached to direct.
And even there I know that once we have all our cast, there will be changes that suggest themselves.
Writing is rewriting.
I'm not saying rewrite endlessly. There is a point at which you've brought a script to the point where you are making things different without making them better; there's a point where you can legitimately say, "That's the best I can do right now." Only great notes or six months away can give you a better perspective. If you don't have a vision for how the script needs to be, then further rewriting will just cause the script to drift.
But still, there it is: three days in a hotel room for a couple of scenes. It paid off for him, dinnit?
I'm back at my desk after a week of WGC National Forum, a trip to Winnipeg to rebreak a script with a director, and a trip to New York to see my folks. Next week, off I go to Kuujjuarapik. (Any of you up there?)
The first thing I do for a serious rewrite is take the old script back down to index cards. That's the best way to see, feel, and reshape the structure.
(I do this even if it's my own script. Not that it should matter: I try to approach any script the same whether I wrote it or not. The good parts are good no matter who wrote them; the bad parts need fixing. The only real difference is it's easier to see the flaws in someone else's work.)
Then I'm going to write up the scenes I think need to happen (we talked about them at length) and start to fool around with the cards to see how they fit together...
I'm working on my fifth screenplay and while I am still improving as a writer, the pace with which I write is too slow. I want to crank out three perfect spec pages every day, but it takes me all day just to write two pages and many times I get stuck. I tend to get bogged down trying to make the right choices. I could never write for TV with its fast pace. Could you shed some light on how you improved as a writer over time in quality but also in speed? Thanks!
I'd love to help, but I was always fast. If anything, I'd say I've had to learn to slow down.
I think I write fast mostly because I plan ahead, and then I don't overthink.
Planning ahead means making sure in advance that I know what the scene has to do. I have a beat sheet that tells me what has to happen by the end of the scene. So the only hard part about writing the scene from the outline is figuring out how to get into the scene.
Not overthinking it means I am not trying to write three perfect pages a day. If I'm writing a feature, I am trying to write at least five pages a day, and on a good day, maybe up to twelve. If I'm writing TV, I could easily hit fifteen pages a day, and I've written an entire half hour script in a day. (TV is faster because I know the characters and the template; there's less to invent.) Some of those pages may be what I hoped for. Some may not. But I'm probably not going to go back and even read them until I've written the whole script. Once I've written a scene, I won't go back and fuss with it unless something I write down the road specifically makes me think I need to add something.
I think it's inefficient to rewrite pages before you've written the whole script. Only once you've written the whole script do you know how the pieces fit. You may realize that a scene that was just not working is just not working because of something you didn't do right earlier. Or you may realize you don't actually need that scene. Why fuss with it until you can see it in context?
I would say that probably the shortest period of time I spend writing a script is writing the first draft. I spend more time thinking up the concept and creating the outline. And then I tweak.
Stop worrying and just write.
Had kind of a depressing meeting where my producer was picking on some plot points in the script that have been there for many drafts. One is a coincidence that we've always felt was okay because it doesn't help the hero.
As I told him (which is why I don't mind putting it in the blog), when a plot point that has always been okay is suddenly no good, it could be just the first time someone has noticed it, but it's often a sign that something else is broken. For example, if you're bumping on the coincidence, maybe the emotional through line of the story isn't working at that point; and then people start to look for something to pick on to explain what's wrong.
So now we're trying to crystallize what really isn't working. My guess is it isn't the coincidence.
