Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them.
--Joseph Joubert
Having previously pontificated on the necessity of plowing through a first draft, no matter how awful it may be, it seems only fair to look at how a good draft gets written, as opposed to a shitty one. Here's a few thoughts born of personal experience.
1) Put it away first.
I don't know if you go through this, but I almost always encounter Last Night's Me. Last Night's Me wrote something and went to bed thinking it was great. This Morning's Me reads it over and can't believe that other guy was so deluded. Given this natural evolution of ever-bettering me's, I find that the principle applies to draft completion.
Wouldn't it be wonderful to have a completely objective, marvelously shrewd and insightful version of you to go over the finished first draft and identify what needs to be fixed? Well, that person can't possibly be the you who's just finished writing it. You're way too close to the experience. The smartest thing to do with a first draft is to bury it, literally or figuratively; put it away and don't look at it, for as long as you can possibly stand it. A week is too short, so I recommend two weeks minimum, and really, a month is far better. The longer you don't see it, the easier it will be for you to really see it. The Future You, believe me, will be far less attached and more effectively tough than The You That Just Got Done.
2) Give it to readers you trust.
Hopefully you have friends or significant others who are willing to tell you the truth, without being mean-spirited about it. I recommend giving it to an odd number, so you can get a consensus, since merely having one friend who loves it and one who hates it will only leave you stumped. Screenwriter Richard Curtis is fortunate enough to live with a woman who's really his collaborator in this regard, Emma Freud:
I give her this script... and she has a big red pen... and she marks it all up. "CDB" is her favorite thing, which stands for "could do better" -- "CDB" and big crosses-out and "you must be joking." We go through that process ten, fifteen, twenty times. I'm very lucky like that. I think that's an amazing thing, to have someone take that care with you even before it gets to other people.
"Even before it gets to other people" in Curtis's case is interesting, as he's famously spoken of having completed 17 entire drafts of Four Weddings and a Funeral (that's post-Emma drafts), for his director, various producers, actors, et al; Notting Hill he estimates took 20 -- and this was in order to realize an idea that he'd been carrying around and casually poking at, for years.
Anyway, in terms of that very first read -- I've written elsewhere on the art of receiving and comprehending notes,
but I'll reiterate one suggestion here: Give your readers a specific
task. Let them know the kind of feedback you're most interested in. "I want to know which parts felt slow" and "I'm curious to hear what you think of my villain" are statements more apt to yield helpful responses, and forestall your receiving a list of typos. You'll get to the typos -- 17 rewrites and more to come. Right?
3) Prioritize your tasks.
The real work, and the real joy in rewriting -- generally I find it more exhilarating than torturous, though it can be that -- comes from knowing what you're after. After you've collated your own responses and those of your trusted readers, make a list. What's the most important thing that needs to be addressed? Personally, I always start with character empathy. Until I feel sure that the reader can identify with the protagonist, feel their feelings and track their logic, none of the other smaller matters really matter to me. You may prefer to start with structure. But whatever your main priority, it has to trump all others. Go after that first, and that alone.
I've found there's nothing worse than trying to fix say, characterization and structure simultaneously. You're bound to get bogged down and lost in the maze of possibilities. There's something freeing about leaving a lot of the mess alone and simply grappling with a single issue that you've got a handle on. In rewriting my novel, when I did one entire pass on one protagonist's dialogue, the clarity of focus really helped.
And at some point in this process, you'll have to kill your proverbial darlings. One of my all time favorite quotes on this matter comes from Samuel Johnson:
Read over your compositions, and, when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
Paddy Chayefsky came at it from a more specific angle:
[Somerset Maugham] said, "If it should occur to you to cut, do so." If you're reading through and stop, something is wrong. Cut it. If something bothers you, then it's bad... It's purifying. It's refining. Making it precise... My own rules are very simple. First, cut out all the wisdom; then cut out all the adjectives.
4) Be fearless and be flexible.
Musing on Johnson and Chayefsky's ruthlessness, I realized that the subtext corresponds to that "write a shitty draft" idea. A few readers who commented on the last post decried this methodology, noting that a detailed outline or a rewrite-as-you-go approach worked better for them. Fine! My point, in that post and this one, is that judgment, second-guessing, and perfectionism, et al, are just the many masks of fear.
It's a process. You'll get it wrong, have to write it better, again, differently. You may, like Philip Roth did with one novel, write nearly 200 pages and then throw the whole thing away, having discovered what he really wanted to write. From working on movies at Universal, I can tell you that the ones that die in Development Hell are most often the ones where the writers are stubbornly unwilling to let their projects evolve.
Hand in hand with a certain kind of bravery -- the courage to do it, do it, do it until you're satisfied -- comes a willingness to accept change. You have to allow the possibility that "what the story is about" may, and most probably will, shift. The further you go, the more you find out about your characters and their conflicts, the more likely you are to reassess, re-conceive, re-vision your movie.
You start with a vision. And as you try to realize it, if you're learning from your labors (as I hope you are), that vision will expand, deepen, become more strange and distinctly... yours. You need to allow your story its room to grow.
When it's fully grown, of course, there'll be plenty of time to sweat the smaller stuff. And then you'll really be in trouble.
Paris Review: How much rewriting do you do?
Hemingway: It depends. I rewrote the ending of Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.
Paris Review: Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you?
Hemingway: Getting the words right.
Always surprised on those days when the mind makes her shotgun, metaphoric leaps for reasons I've never been able to trace. Remembered that Wang Wei said a thousand years ago, "Who knows what causes the opening and closing of the door?"
--Jim Harrison
There's a story told about James Thurber at a dinner party, caught by his daughter staring into space while the rest of the guests were in the midst of conversation. "What's the matter with Daddy?" she asked, and her mother assured her, "Don't worry, honey, he's just writing."
You're still writing, you just aren't aware of it. Somewhere in your brain, in the "not-top-of-mind" part, you're arranging, rearranging, connecting, disconnecting and more or less figuring out what needs to be done. Inspiration is when the guys in the R&D area of your brain knock on the door and say, "Here it is."
-- Bill at WriteLife
Bill's quote came in a comment on my last post, in which I was kickin' some writer butt, saying that now, now is the time to get your writing done, as in: get your ass in the chair and your hands on the keyboard, whether you feel inspired or not, because waiting around for inspiration is a loser's game.
This time out I feel obliged to offer a corollary, as suggested by my subsequent musings and Bill's comment: When you are writing regularly, really working and working it, immersing yourself in the writing on a daily basis, it is equally imperative that you stop.
Take a break. Leave it alone.
Because it is when you are deeply steeped in the work, writing as much as your hands can stand to keep up with your brain, that the other less conscious parts of you are freed to take over the reins when your hands give out.
When you're out in the world, you listen to dialogue and think about other things while your subconscious is working on whatever the problems are in the script. Once, when I really got stuck on something, I took a weekend off and went to Santa Barbara. I wasn't thinking about it and woke up in the middle of the night suddenly understanding where I had gone wrong and what I had to change. Sometimes, your mind has to be released in order to get past things, like a muscle that knots up so tight, there isn't enough blood going through it. It has to relax in order for the blood to flow again.
-- Amy Holden Jones
So many Eureka! moments for writers occur in the car, in the shower, at the dinner party. But I do believe they occur because the writer has been down in the mines every day, shoveling away. Naturally enough, many writers integrate away-from-the-desk time into their schedule.
Walking is best. Any physical activity helps. For instance, I'm often full of ideas the day after my wife and I go dancing.
--Tom Schulman
If a man who writes feels like going to a zoo, he should by all means go to a zoo. He might even be lucky, as I once was when I paid a call at the Bronx Zoo and found myself attending the birth of twin fawns. It was a fine sight, and I lost no time writing a piece about it.
-- E.B. White
Whatever your chosen alternate mode of activity, it's useful not only for letting that other side of the brain take over, but for holding onto your mind, as well.
The solitude of writing is quite frightening. It's quite close sometimes to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch. The ordinary action of taking a dress down to the dry cleaner's or spraying some plants infected with greenfly is a very sane and good thing to do. It brings one back, so to speak. It also brings the world back.
-- Nadine Gordimer
So peculiar, this pursuit of ours, that feeds on the world yet needs to hide away from it, to create another world all our own. Is it any wonder -- Write! Don't write! -- that a writer often lives from one confusion to another?
There was a period last fall when every time I began to write, I went into a perfect blank-minded euphoria, where I stared out the window and felt a love for and oneness with everything. I sat in this state, sometimes for the whole time I had planned to write. I thought to myself, "Lo and behold, I am becoming enlightened! This is much more important than writing, and besides this is where all writing leads." After this had gone on for quite a while, I asked Katagiri Roshi about it. He said, "Oh, it's just laziness. Get to work."
-- Natalie Goldberg
But seriously --
Flogo photo by Mark Humphrey
Amy Holden Jones and Tom Schulman quotes from: The 101 Habits of Highly Successful Screenwriters by Karl Iglesias, a useful tome for all screenwriters to own.