THE FIRST DRAFT HONEYMOON PHASE

You’ve written your first draft - in hindsight, it will be total dogshit, but for now at least it’s the best thing that you’ve ever written.

So time passes, you have a moment to reflect and finally relax, maybe skim some sad stones across a lonely river and when you’re ready comes the part of editing. Cutting and trimming to fit a timespan, edging out the duff parts to make it move as smoothly as possible is no easy feat. Let me assure you, your short film, novel, screenplay, etc, right now in its earliest first draft stage is a “fixer-upper” . However with a cut-throat savageness in your trimming down it could quite easily be a Ferrari.

chopping and changing is difficult but necessary

At least from a screenplay point of view you have to look on your copy as a blueprint; that shall be added to, enhanced and worked out by your director, cast and crew.

Scenes will make the cut, others won’t. Lines will be chopped and scrapped for time and as the very first moderator of your own work, with eyes that are so tired of seeing the same line over and over, this is where you step in and decide on what is and what is not needed.

no one likes being told their baby is ugly

It’s really about refining. And don’t be stubborn about this either. The lifestyle of a writer is lonely on purpose; so that when you do finally reveal your new-born to the world, everyone else can assume that you’re great and there was never any real edit needed and it just came out like this. Continuing this metaphor, you’re its parent and with each edit you are telling them what is and isn’t right, you’re teaching it lessons so that when it grows up (ie is published) it will be an upstanding member of the public (ie a classic for the ages). You’ll talk about it all the time to friends and family, who in turn ask how it’s doing (it’s a bestseller, and is being turned in to a movie), and then when you get older it will be able to buy you a home in the country from its success. You’ll finally retire, having created others that you are also extremely proud of. And then you’ll die and be remembered through these babies for the rest of time. They’ll inspire others.

re writing is a fine art

Ernest Hemingway supposedly said that “The only kind of writing is rewriting.” If this quote is accurate then take it and believe that this quote took multiple tries to get right too - whittled down until it became the effortless perfect thing that you read now.

Here’s a personal confession; I’m a sucker for using the word “just” in my writing. Seemingly every third sentence or so, and my brain tells me that I just need to use it there. Because there are no other, 'better words' when in fact, “just” is a great example for something that (for the most part) probably doesn’t need to be there. Although, yes, in this particular case, it will help emphasise just how bad or great this thing really is, it does however make every sentence simpl, well...longer. Here’s a quote from Mark Twain that really helps cement my point:

Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very'; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

This year, we cut our short film, Dogs Chasing Cars’ original audio down from a garish and practically blasphemous twenty-seven minutes to an actually palatable eight. It took about a month for this to happen and with each new edit, whilst going back and forth with my editor, I told him that I can’t cut it any more, every, single time. But I did and it’s a far better project for it (Dogs has just been accepted in to Berlin and simply wouldn’t have been at it's original 20 plus minutes)

Kill your darlings. Be brutal. The edit is an invisible player that makes your project appear as seamless and as idyllic as it does.

put asside your pride and do what's best for your project

I want to leave you with this amazing moment from Swingers. Pre-Marvel days, Jon Favreau’s Mike has just gotten a sweet girl’s phone number - after asking his mates when the right time to call is, he ignores all of their advice and calls her anyway.