Dispatch from The Quest: Scott Reynolds

The Quest participants have been hard at work pounding out a first draft of their original screenplays, but Scott Reynolds has found the time to compose a dispatch for us.

In 12 years of state-mandated school I never wrote a single rough draft. Not one. It was a problem, too, because teachers had an infatuation with making you turn in a rough draft for a grade. It was one of the three most inane, useless things about my educational experience, the other two being showing work on basic math problems and hiding under the desk for nuclear war drills.

Honestly. Me physically writing down the simple equation refactoring I did in my head is not gonna tell you I understand the material any more than doing the ol’ duck-and-cover is going to save our third grade class from the nuclear blast.

I mean, it wasn’t like I was just bucking authority (which I did plenty of), or me thinking I’m some hotshot prodigy writer (which I also did plenty of). The simple truth was just that’s not how I wrote. I edit in place. Always have. I write, my brain scans ahead, I format the words how I want them, and I keep writing. Yeah, sometimes, back in my halcyon paper and pen days (I didn’t have a computer to on which to type assignments until high school) I’d cross out a word in favor of another here and there, but by and large, my first draft was my final draft. When I was typing…forget it. You don’t cross out words leave them on screen.

It was always frustrating to get yelled at, or receive (not earn, goddamnit, receive) a lower grade because my first draft was the same as my final. It wasn’t like I was shirking work. It was just how I wrote. I mean I AGONIZED over every word, every sentence, every turn of phrase. I did the work. I just did it in real-time, as I went. Once I was done, I was done.

So here I am trying to write for a living; trying to become “professional”. And in doing so, I find myself in a place where I’m examining a lot of the truths I’ve held as self-evident for 30 or so years about how I approach writing.

In the Quest, we’re working through first drafts. I just dropped off Act I a couple of days ago. Getting to the end of Act I was a struggle for me. Not because of the content, but because I was constantly battling the urge to real-time rewrite. On the one hand, I know that I need to trust my instincts, and that sometimes when I’m “in the moment” is when I’ll see what this line of dialogue should be, or how this scene should really go. On the other hand, I know that I can agonize over this line of dialogue and go back a thousand times to that scene, and if I’m not careful, I’ll just never finish. So it’s all about finding the balance.

I sometimes try to produce what some call the “vomit draft”. Just put the words to the page and, you know, fuck it. Whatever comes out is what it is until you’re done, and then you go back and fix it. I see a lot of merit to that, and it’s sort of how I do idea generation, but when I’m actually writing, I just can’t bear to shut the inner editor down completely. There is absolutely no way I could sleep at night if I knew I was just blatantly throwing crap on the page with no regard for how it’s going to look at the end.

It’s especially hard to deal with this, I think, writing comedy. If I go too long without consciously recognizing that I’ve tried to write something funny, I panic. If I know where a joke has to be, but don’t know what that joke is, it’s stop the presses time until I come up with something. It could be anything even a little funny, something to build on later, but it has to be something. I can’t leave that spot on the page without taking a shot at a joke.

Sometimes I’m able to satisfy myself by making a note of something. They’re usually along the lines of “do a thing where the guy says something about this but it’s funny and slide it in here.” If I know I’m on a roll and don’t want to disrupt myself from being productive, I’ll make that note and feel okay about it. Not great. Just okay enough to move on.

Part of me always wants to get in there RIGHT NOW and figure out the perfect implementation, but the more I mature as a writer, the easier it is to tell myself “you will be able to figure it out tomorrow from this note, so let’s plow on and get a couple of more scenes in before this coffee wears off.” And I always come back tomorrow and do the note, because if I wait more than a few days, I’ll never be able to read my handwriting, and it will be lost forever. I have whole notebooks of scribbles that were probably a good idea at some point, like when I was on a 6 train and saw something and had a brilliant flash of inspiration, but looking at the note now I have no clue what it says or means. If my life were an episode of “Seinfeld,” it’s that one where he writes down the joke he thought about while half asleep, and nobody can figure out what it means.

I feel like this battle is a struggle for a lot of writers. How much do you allow yourself to be bad just to get things out versus how much do you really refine as you go. For me, I lean more to the refining end of the spectrum, but I try to balance that by telling myself it’s okay to not be perfect in the name of productivity. After all, it’s only a first draft.

However, even now, knowing that I couldn’t possibly write something as large and detailed as a screenplay or novel in a single draft, I know that I’ll still never truly produce a first draft, because every single line has probably been rewritten once or thrice before I type “the end”.

(Except this blog post. This was 100% stream of conscious. Even this part.)

This subject is one we all confront: The goal of a first draft — “Get the damn thing done!” — versus the instinct to refine, edit, tweak, and — worst of all — perfect.

If we have these two in some sort of balance, we can forge ahead to FADE OUT, writing and editing, and end up with a pretty solid initial take on the story.

If these two impulses conflict with each other too much, perfectionism stifling productivity, that is the short train to disaster, one known as Unfinished Script.

As much as I sermonize about the importance of just getting from FADE IN to FADE OUT, I’m not immune to the instinct to revise pages while knocking them out. In fact, confession time: I edit my first draft a lot as I write it. I re-read my pages at night and make margin notes, then do those changes to start off my writing session the next day. Not every day, but most. I find the practice immerses me deeper into the story, makes me feel more confident about my pages, entices me back to my desk, and in truth is something I enjoy.

Then again, I’ve written dozens of scripts, so I’m confident my process won’t derail me.

The struggle that Scott is going through with this script is an important one. In the world of professional screenwriting — and especially TV — you have to be able to write quickly. Schedules and turnaround times, they are always on top of you, so the ability to jam out pages is, for the most part, a requirement.

About Scott: Brooklyn based writer and comedian who bailed on software to focus on writing words that humans could read. Twitter: @scottadhoc.