Question: How long for a first draft?

Another open forum question from E.C. Henry:

Do you advocate “page budgeting” in the outline-to-1st draft stage?

Here’s where I’m coming from:

Currently I do some prep work before I write, but I’m finding as I write a first draft most of the time I write too long, 140 + pages, and then I have to pair it back during the editing process. Invaribly some gags and funny stuff falls by the wayside — and that makes me a little sad.

In his book, “Writing the Romantic Comedy,” Billy Mernit advocates that 1st drafts are for “finding out what you’re writing about.” And in one of his blog posts earlier he talks about writing beyond your draft to create more fully realized characters.

But where do you fall on this arguement? Writing long to FIND your stroy, vs. writing a first draft which falls within the exceptable norm of page count where professional readers wont laugh you out of the room?

Okay, standard caveats up front: Every writer is different, every story is different. Some writers need to ‘find’ the story by doing less prep-writing, preferring to dive into first draft as a draft of discovery. Some writers outline in advance the script scene-by-scene. 

By the way per the latter, check out this quote from screenwriter-director Paul Schrader:

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.

“I know to the half-page if I’m on or off target” — before he writes the script. That, my friend, is some serious prep-writing!

So part of the answer to your question depends upon what type of writer you are: If you’re a “use the first draft as a draft of discovery” writer, then you should not judge yourself harshly if you turn in a 150–175 page first draft; if you’re an “outline the story in advance til my eyes bleed” writer and you’ve written a 140 page first draft, then you may have some story structure issues.

But not to worry because I think Billy Mernit’s advice is spot on, so allow me to incorporate it into an approach which uses one of my screenwriting mantras: “The only rule about a first draft is to get the damn thing done.”

Just as a screenplay’s universe — the story world you create — is comprised of two parts, the External World (the physical realm of action and dialogue) and the Internal World (the emotional realm of intention and subtext), so, too, does the writing universe have those two aspects: There are the actual physical pages we pound out (External World) and our concomitant understanding of what the story is about (Internal World). 

So regarding the first draft, how about this paradigm:

External World of Writing: “Just get the damn thing done.”
Internal World of Writing: “Find out what you’re writing about.”

There you go. Myers & Mernit conjoined at the metaphorical hip.

To paraphrase the great screenwriting guru Al Davis, owner of the Oakland Raiders, when you dive into the first draft, “Just write, baby!”

So circling back to your question, if you’re a pre-pro writer and you’re writing on spec — that is you’re not writing an assignment with a specific due date and a locked time frame for delivery — then I would say that page count for a first draft is pretty much irrelevant. You have twin goals: Get the damn thing done and discover what the story is about. However many pages you need to write to accomplish those goals, that’s the number of pages you need to write.

And in all honesty, unless the script is completely bloated and the writer is dead set on keeping every last scene or line of dialogue, trimming page count is actually pretty easy. But that’s for another post. If anyone is interested in my thoughts on that process, post a question in comments, and I’ll get to the subject someday soon.

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