Screenwriting : Edits. by Rodney Simmons

I think it depends on your style of writing and mood. There are times when I will get on a roll and write and entire piece straight through. (I've done 100 pages in less than a week.) At other times, I dwell over and spend weeks editing the same 10-15 pages. As a writer and a teacher, I have come to realize there is no one size fits all in any creative process. What has worked best for you and enabled you to be most productive?

Yeah, about the same. After a few "clean up the awful stuff" passes, I usually start at the beginning and read until I hit something terrible. Then I fix that and start reading from the beginning again. Once I've got a comfortable "not terrible" draft, I look for opportunities to punch up. Is that key line of dialogue sharp enough? Is that heist scene cool enough? I usually create a whammo chart... each page with a 1-10 rating for action, sex-appeal, tension, comedy, etc. Then I graph it and can visually see... "whoops, there's a 15-page trough where I don't have an 8/9/10 for anything. Might need to reorder some scenes!" All the while I'm looking for things to cut. Extraneous dialogue. Scenes that don't drive the story. Then, ideally, I walk away for a month and then re-read. At that point I'll either think, "hey, that was pretty good," or "jeez, what was I thinking??" Lather, rinse, repeat.

Nicely put, Kerry.

Rewriting and editing are different. With rewriting, you are trying to make the piece the best representation of your original vision. I found this free phone seminar to be good. http://screenwritingu.com/classes/21-screenwriting-rewrite-strategies

I always try to focus on the underlying structure and character development. Structure is the trickiest thing to get right. It's easy to get caught up in details like dialogue / action lines etc, but if you don't need that scene for the overall structure, that time is wasted.

Rewriting and editing are different? Sounds like semantic nitpicking. What is lost in using the terms interchangeably?

Because, Kerry, they attempt to do different things. Editing is wordsmithing and how well something reads. Rewriting, is reworking the piece to bring out it's best. The advice is to do wordsmithing last because it tends to set what you've written. Where if you re-evaluate the story, character, etc first, you might find improvements. After the rewriting is done, then do the wordsmithing. (To tell the truth, I often wordsmith first myself, because it forces me to read the piece again, carefully. Thus I might find missing setups or payoffs, etc. But I think there is value in rewriting first, then wordsmithing.)

Wordsmithing, a good word I haven't heard for a long while.

Yeah, I can't not "wordsmith", as you call it, whenever I reread. If I'm distracted by poor wording, I won't be able to process the pacing. Refining something you'll probably throw away later is just the price of getting it right.

I like to use the word edit for both wordsmithing and rewriting. I do think there's a difference between doing a Page 1 rewrite, and an editing pass, but, like Kerry, I often intend to do an edit and wind up doing more of a rewrite. Years ago, I read a terrific document published by the Jet Propulsion Lab that clearly deliniated THIRTEEN different levels of editing. I never looked at editing as a simple or routine task again. It's truly amazing how much a writer can do to improve a work that seems, at first glance, flawless.

Weird, I'm always reading Jet Propulsion Lab documents, and I totally missed that one. Sounds interesting. :)

Hi Kerry. Here's the link to the JPL document I mentioned above. http://www.technical-expressions.com/learn2edit/levels-of-edit/levels_of....

My first edits are more for sentence flow. I like to also look at the big picture. Did I achieve strong character arch? Is each scene necessary? Dialog is usually horrible at this stage too. Every time I read it, I improve the dialog. Then I go back and forth and eliminate the grammatical errors, etc.

I edit as I write. I had a set piece planned, but once there, I thought about my character. She would never initiate such an action. I didn't know that when I started, but got to know her while writing. I tried the vomit draft strategy once, but everything had to be edited so I went back to editing on a continual basis. If a problem comes up it gets taken care of quickly, rather than letting it metastasize and affect all the following work.

I do continuous editing as I write, but I also make additional editing passes of the day's work at the end of each day. Once I type "The End," the real editing process begins in which I question every word I've written. Then I do a page by page edit, a sequence edit, and at least two final edits. Then I put the manuscript away for several months. When I take it out and look at it with fresh eyes, damn if I don't find a typo before I finish reading three pages. The truth is, it's never finished. Never. Unless someone buys it. Then they give it to some writer you've never met and ask him or her to do a Page 1 Rewrite. If you don't believe me, look up the story behind Hereafter, directed by Clint Eastwood. Someone gave out an early draft without the author's knowledge. A few days later, Eastwood called the author to let him know he was planning to direct the film. The writer was upset. In his opinion, it needed another 10 drafts before he felt it would be ready to let anyone else read it!

I'm afraid one does EDIT their first draft - I never write THE END, only FADE OUT - I usually write from notes, I constantly revise as I go along, once completed I usually give myself 1-2 week break, then further revision, diluting, improving - all my scripts have a song, once I sing it in my head, I'm immediately transported into the script/story WORLD - eventually, I'm satisfied enough to the point where I'm prepared to upload the script, but revision never stops, it's an ongoing process.

Why do you feel it's better to write multiply drafts instead of just editing the first one?

I think Alle's approach is not typical. If it works for her, great, but I doubt that's what most people do. I would guess that the reason she does that is to avoid the common rewrite trap: leaving something in just because it's what you wrote the first time. That is definitely a danger. But rather than starting from scratch, potentially introducing new typos and giving yourself a lot of unnecessary work, I'd suggest making sure that as you rewrite you QUESTION EVERYTHING. Make sure every word, line, beat, scene, etc. is absolutely essential to your script. Treat the last draft like it was written by an idiot, and judge everything you wrote last time extremely harshly. Do that enough times, and theoretically what's on the page should continually improve until it's good enough to send into the world, or until you're sick of it. That's the approach I take. Starting over with a blank page would kill my process, but everyone's process is their own.

Thanks.