Fury of the Red Pen… (ep. 10)
Picture a before and after photo. You know the two I’m talking about. The first one being the bloated photo where the person in question is seen as a little unkempt, a little rotund, a little. . . well, a little fat. In any case, that person could easily stand to lose 20, 50, maybe even 100 lbs. Then you take that second photo. The “after” photo. It’s the sleek, tanned and on its way to becoming fit photo that if given a chance, would kick sand in the face of the slovenly first photo as if to say, “Hey, chunky, check out all the ladies checking ME out.”
Anyway, lost amidst that analogy is the status of the current screenplay. Not quite the before and not quite the after. Basically, what a script is and what a script will be post-rewrite. It’s in that weird purgatory between the First Draft and the First rewrite. With the first being the, “I want to have a great scene about dairy cows amidst my sci-fi epic!” And the first rewrite deciding, “Uh, yeah, the dairy cow thing. . . maybe not such a good idea for the off-world colonial civil war.”
Right now, with ABaHS, I’m right in the middle of that realm between the two. I still have the bloated mess that is the first draft, but I’m also within sight of the leaner, meaner fighting machine that will become the second draft. Well, maybe not so much as a fighting machine since it IS technically only the Second Draft, but maybe it’s on its way to having the ability to take the flight of stairs without huffing and puffing.
And I owe it all to that tool we feared in grade school. The true teacher’s pet. The mighty red pen.
I’m not sure when I fell in love with the rewrite process, but there is some sort of perverse thrill about going page by page, line by line excising and abolishing entire speeches, scenes and sometimes even characters with the sole purpose of obtaining a workable script.
I. Love. It.
I’ve always been a fan of the term, “vomiting out” the First Draft. It’s the draft in which you just don’t hold back, because you don’t want to start self-editing until you’re ready too. I quickly learned the real characters and the real script would come out through that red pen process. Who cares if dairy cows save the day in the first draft? By the time the second draft comes around and I’ve sobered up a bit, the dairy cows have left the building, but are sure to pop up in another script down the road.
So how long do I wait between the First Draft and the first rewrite? You’ll hear a lot of people say you have to step away and take a break so you can look at it with fresh eyes, but while I’ll agree with that somewhere around draft five or six, with that first draft you just want to go in hacking and slashing. After the kitchen sink approach with the initial bit of writing, I’ve got to have a quick turnaround with the rewrite, otherwise I’ll start to let the old writer’s fears creep in and start thinking, “There’s so much here, where do I begin?”
And before you know it, I’ve convinced myself that maybe the dairy cows SHOULD stay.
Goddamn dairy cows.
In other words, and another analogy, after you’ve let the yard grow, you’ve got to mow the whole lot before you can go in with the weedwhacker for some precision trimming.
NEXT: Killing your babies…
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