In 2005 and 2006, John answered questions from writers about knowing when you’ve done enough drafts to feel confident in sharing your work (and keeping your motivation through the latter drafts).
How many rewrites do you go through before you feel your baby is ready to be read by agents, producers, etc?
— Daniel De Lago
When I read about professional chefs, they often talk about having a “food sense” that tells them when something is ready. That is, they can put the fish under the broiler, then go off and work on something else, and return at exactly the moment the fish is perfectly cooked.
This “knowing when it’s done” sense only develops with experience. Beginning chefs are all too likely to pull something out a little too raw or overcooked and flavorless.
And the same is true with screenwriting. When I was first starting out, I was really unsure about when a draft was finished. I now have a pretty good sense of when something is ready for public consumption, which for me is really the first draft. That is, I’ve generally hand-written scenes, typed them up, assembled them into one big draft (called, cleverly, the “first assembly”). I then spend considerable hours tweaking and shaping and revising until I have what I consider the first draft.
This is what goes to my assistant for proofreading and reality-checking. (“Did you mean for the hero to leave in a helicopter but land in a private jet?”) A few quick fixes, and it’s ready to be seen by whoever the point person is on the project, generally the producer or executive who hired me.
Should you, Daniel, hand in a draft this early? Probably not. I’m a better writer now than when I first began, and don’t make the same mistakes I used to.
To continue the cooking analogy, one way to make sure something is done is to check the temperature. Use your trusted friends and colleagues as your thermometer. Let them be your guide as to when something is safe to put on the plate.
When starting out did you ever have trouble finding motivation to keep working on rewrites? Doesn’t the same story lose its interest after about four drafts?
— Brannek Gaudet
Good guess. Four drafts is about the right number.
The first draft is exciting, bewildering and fresh. For the second draft, you have all sorts of brilliant new ideas and suggestions to try out, so that keeps it interesting. The third draft is generally damage-control from the second draft, where many of those good ideas ended up not working. The fourth draft, well…
The fourth draft sucks. By this point, the intractable problems of your script are readily apparent, and you’re faced with either (a) writing around them, or (b) trying to tackle them head on. In my experience, while you should choose (b), you generally choose (a).
It all boils down to two related questions: What script did you sit down to write, and what script did you end up writing?
At this fourth draft stage, you have to really decide between Great in Theory and what Actually Works. If you approach it this way, you can sometimes gain fresh eyes on your script. Read it as if some other, lamer screenwriter wrote it. What would you do differently?
Then, do that.
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