GITS Reader Question: Is it better to write long first drafts or short?
A Tweet from @_Mered:
Scott, are your First Drafts usually too short or overlong? Which is easiest to remedy?
To put things in perspective, check out this quote from writer-director Nancy Meyers [It’s Complicated, Something’s Gotta Give]:
“My first draft was exactly 250 pages. I didn’t have brads deep enough, long enough to get through the script. It took me about eight or nine drafts [to edit]. Just keep going, I think from the first draft to the second, I cut about seventy pages. It’s just like making the movie. I’m now editing it, and I thought, ‘How am I going to get two hours and forty-five minutes down to two hours?’ It was the same king of thing again. How do you do it? You just start tearing away at it, and you can’t do it all at once. It’s impossible to see what it is at first. You just keep taking away and taking away, and it begins to shape up. Story, you know–you just keep following the story.”
That is an extreme. I’ve read where the first draft of Chinatown was over 200 pages as well. I’m sure people have heard of other examples. In contrast check out this quote from Paul Schrader [Taxi Driver, Raging Bull:
“I know exactly where I’m going beforehand. I know to the half page if I’m on or off target. I draw up charts before I do a script. I endlessly chart and re-chart a movie. Before I sit down to write, I have all the scenes listed, what happens in each scene, how many pages I anticipate each scene will take. I have a running log on the film. I can look down and see what happens by page thirty, what happens by page forty, fifty, sixty and so forth. I have the whole thing timed out to a hundred and five, a hundred and ten pages. You may go two, three pages ahead or behind, you may add or drop dialogue or scenes; but if you’re two pages ahead or behind, you have to work that into the timing. Especially if you get five pages ahead, or, worse, five pages behind, then something you had planned to work on page forty may not work the same way on page forty-five.”
My guess is if you’re the type of writer who works out a story extensively in advance, like Schrader, you will tend to write pretty close to the final page count in your first draft. If, on the other hand, you use the first draft to find your story, which is what it sounds like Meyers does, you will probably write long, perhaps even really long.
Speaking personally, I fall into the ‘break the story in prep’ group, which is one of the main reasons I devised a Prep workshop to teach those principles and practices. Still my first drafts tend to be long, about 10–15 pages generally. That’s because I’m not terribly concerned with page count in the first draft. In part because I’m confident I know the contour of the story. In part because I know I can always trim those pages in rewrites and edits.
Speaking of which, I believe it’s possible when you are at the final edit stage to knock out 5 pages without even blinking an eye simply by using some trimming tricks. Here are four of them:
Beyond those editing tricks, when you write long, you can always benefit by going through the script again and again, asking yourself this question of every scene, even every line: Is this essential? Does my story absolutely need this to work? You’d be amazed at how much dross there is in a first or even subsequent draft if you approach it with a really critical eye.
Conversely if you write short, well… I’m not going to say a story can’t work at 80–85 pages. A story can work with any page count. But if you’re talking about a feature length original screenplay that you are going to submit to Hollywood for consideration, most script readers will see any screenplay that lands on their desk with that page count as being an undercooked story; that is they will think the writer didn’t dig deep enough, didn’t really flesh out the story to what it could be. That’s why generally it’s advisable to hit the 100 page mark, at least insofar as that concern of a reader’s perception is concerned.
And you know what? Most short scripts I read do tend to suffer from being less evolved than they could be. Thin characters, not enough twists and turns, not enough depth of emotion, etc.
So to answer the original question — Is it better to write long first drafts or short — I would much rather write long and be able to trim, rather than write short, then have to go back and figure out how to legitimately expand my story and not pad it.
How about you? Do you tend to write long? Short? What have you done if you wrote a short script? What do you do if you write long? What advice do you have for _Mered?
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