On Rewriting and Rewriting

I'm halfway through writing a screenplay and 70-odd thousands words into a novel and it is fairly common practice for me to jump back a few pages on each every day and tidy up what I wrote the day before. Unconsciously, I refer to this as rewriting. It isn't.

Eric Roth, who has won more Academy Awards for his screenplays than most, starts at page one every day and makes tweaks and changes all the way through until he get up to date and can continue on a fresh page. This a great practice if you have the discipline. It is also not rewriting.

When I finish the script I'm writing right now, I will print it out and go through it page by page with a red pen; fixing typos, tightening dialogue and making edits. If anyone asks what I'm doing, I might tell them I'm working on the rewrite. But I'm not, I'm editing. I am not rewriting.

In screenwriting, editing and rewriting are two different things. Editing is what you do to tidy and tighten a script ready for someone to read it. You're trying to get it to flow, to have it read well, make sense, and to excises as many typos as you possibly can (you'll never get them all). This is professionalism and it is a courtesy to the reader, be they a friend or a professional. I have a fairly hard line on this - if I'm asking someone to read something, it has to reach this low bar of usability. If someone sends me a script that is full of typos, or the formatting is all over the shop (unless that is clearly deliberate), then I am not going to read it. Give me the experience of seeing your movie in my head, don't give me the experience of marking 8th grade homework.

Editing is not rewriting.

This week, I have been dipping in and out of Jack Epps Jr's excellent book "Screenwriting is Rewriting". Subtitled "The Art and Craft of Professional Revision", Epps takes us on a wide-ranging tour of different approaches to rewriting scripts, whether prompted by studio notes or by a personal desire to tell a better story.

Epps deals with character construction, story structure, pacing etc etc. And, if nothing else, it's a stark reminder of how much work there is to do on a script AFTER you think you've finished it. That first draft, however polished you think it is, is the bare bones of an idea and it WILL need to be revised, maybe (and ideally) not right away, but at some point. It will be revised, and revised, and revised again. Between you typing "FADE OUT" and a director shouting "ACTION", there could be anything from six to a dozen to several dozen drafts. And each one should be executed with thought and precision.

The book serves as a useful reminder (which I always need) not to look back too much as you're executing that first draft. That is not to say you shouldn't look back at all. I know some people swear by a so-called "vomit draft" where everything just comes out and they never look back. But I suspect those people, or 99% or them at least, are liars. These projects take time and we always need to check back on some scene we wrote weeks ago and, when we do, we spot typos and mistakes and we fix them as we go. Of course we do.

But generally speaking, getting caught up in "that scene back there doesn't quite work" is a sure-fire way to get stuck in the weeds. You might be right that the scene isn't working yet, you almost certainly are right, but fixing it might mean taking apart the scenes around it, and then you're actively moving backwards not forwards. It's better just to make a note somewhere saying "This sucks" or "Needs work" and move on. Get the first draft done.

More to the point, though, fixing something back there might break something that you didn't even realise, without context, was there in the first place; first draft energy. If you're writing with an amount of gusto, then that is not necessarily going to be apparent from reading back one scene, but it will be apparent when you read the thing as a whole. You might, with the context, appreciate the energy you put into that part of the story and modify the scene in such a way that you don't damage that. Rewriting, proper rewriting, is surgical. Don't attempt it until you understand how the whole piece works.

The Art of Rewriting, and it is most certainly an art, is best analogised (because I am currently hooked on "Drive to Survive") as developing a Formula One car. Your first draft is the building of the car from scratch, and your edits are things like making sure the wheels are all the same size and the tyre pressure is right and the steering wheel is in the right place; basic stuff that allows the car to function as a car. You're making it work. And there is a temptation, upon hearing that engine roar for the first time to shout "Holy fucking shit, everyone, I built a car!" and to be pretty impressed with yourself. Many of us have been there. I have been there more recently that I would care to admit - you created something from nothing and you're so pleased that this thing now exists that you can't wait to share it with the world.

Well now step outside into the pit lane... You see those other cars, which are the same size and shape as yours, roaring by? Those cars look like yours, but they are not like your car. They were once, but now they are something far, far better.

But wait? Is that true of all of them? Can we maybe take heart that there seems to be a number of jalopies and clown cars out there, also competing? Are they really any better than the vehicle we just made? No, maybe they're not. But they're not going to still be there at the end.

Formula One is a perfect analogy if you look at legacy, rather than short term gains. Let's cruelly pick on a movie like, oh, I don't know, "Fountain of Youth". It's standing in for a LOT of other movies like it, but we need one and that's the name that got pulled out of the hat.

I am assuming that the script for "Fountain of Youth" looked like a movie; it was printed on the right number of pages, the formatting seemed fine and, on a cursory read, it seemed sufficiently exciting to qualify. We're only really looking at the script itself here, the car; we're not going to get into the driver being a putz, the pit-crew not being able to find spare tyres etc etc. That car looks like a Formula One car to the untrained eye and it manages not to crash in practice and it gets a place in qualifying owing to an obscure bylaw that says that because this team doesn't have to sell any tickets, this car gets to take part regardless... And then the race starts and this piece-of-shit spins off at the first corner and by lap two no one even remembers it was in the race.

Now, of course, there are countless other cars that were much better conceived and more refined than Fountain of Youth, but even they are nowhere near good enough to get a place on the leader board.

Even the people spraying champagne around have just won that single race, a single race that is standing in here for an opening weekend or an awards season. But the life of a movie can be long, just as there are a lot of races in a season of Formula One. And it's only when we get to the end that we see who the real winners were. The Godfather, Chinatown, The Silence of the Lambs, Top Gun, Forrest Gump etc etc. These are the Ferraris and Mercedes of the movie world. And what do they all have in common? They weren't put into the race the second the car was built.

And thus, we come back around the circuit to our newly-created car. And rewrites.

We have to put our lovely new car, of which we are so proud and which has taken so much work, on an empty track and see how it runs. Is it fast enough? Is it holding the road? How does it corner? How is it on fuel? How are the tyres wearing? The difference between 1st and 2nd in a race can be down to hundredths of a second. That's the level of detail we need to be refining to.

So your car is out there, and it moves forward, which is a start. But it is not nearly fast enough, it pulls to the left, it can't hold a tight corner and its brakes are getting too hot.

So you bring it back in and go to work. But, crucially, you don't work on all of these things at once. So with screenplays. The pacing is off, the character journey isn't quite right, and it could do with a few more jokes? Great. One at a time. We fix one thing, then we put it back out on the track and we see how it works now. Did that fix work? If yes, move on to the next thing. Or can we still get some more speed out of it? Then let's keep working on that.

You don't fix all the things all at once because one fix might adversely affect another, or might negate the need for another (the increased speed of the car might create sufficient downforce to hold it on the corners). You approach your refinements with focus and a rigid methodology.

And when you've fixed all the problems and the car is running like a dream? Well now maybe you attract the attention of a sponsor. And you'd better believe they are going to have some notes. Back to the test-track...

The process is wearing and tiresome and there will be plenty of times when you want to say "That'll do." There may be times when the people around you want you to say "That'll do". But Mercedes and Ferrari NEVER say that. Whereas the people who made "Fountain of Youth"? They had "That'll Do" printed on the team jackets.

And so now; days, weeks, months later, you're done. This script/car cannot be any more refined. This thing runs as well as it possibly can. The sponsors are overjoyed. This thing is finally in a place where it can attract a driver (the director). The driver loves the look of this car, loves the idea of this car, wants to race this car. But when the driver gets in, the car just doesn't really suit their driving style. Could they change their style? Maybe. Are they going to? No. Could you get another driver? Sure, in theory. But the sponsors really want this driver and the driver wants the car modified and the sponsors know it's a lot easier to get a new technician than a new world-class driver.

So now you're back on the test track and you need to get that car running the kind of lap times it needs to be capable of WITH that driver at the wheel. And so, once again, you have to be methodical. When does this driver turn? How is that affecting the balance? They want to hit the brakes later or earlier than you envisaged? They want to come out of turn nine on a tighter line and they need more pace on the straight, but not at the expense of the tyres? You need to take the car apart and rebuild it for this driver WITHOUT losing any of the things that they and everyone else loved about the car in the first place.

It's not easy. It's never easy. And it's never quick. But if you don't put the work in to make this thing the best version of itself that it could possibly be, and if you don't keep on doing that all the way up until the last possible second, then you're not going to be competing against Mercedes and Ferrari for the chequered flag, you're going to be limping around at the back of the pack, complaining about how unfair it is that the other teams get all the luck.

And even if it does work out, as you're hoisting the trophy and getting a face full of champagne, someone is going to tap you on the shoulder to remind you that they need a brand new car, built from scratch, next season.