Ian Dawson's Blog - Posts Tagged "screenplay-drafting-process"
Writing Tip of the Week: Those Early Drafts – For Your Eyes Only
While it may be the title of a James Bond film from the Roger Moore era, ensuring you are the only person who sees your first couple of drafts is essential to the writing process. This is the time in a story’s life cycle when ideas, plot threads, characters, and dialogue are still in their developmental stages, which means they will evolve and change over time to be better than they are at the start.
For this reason, keeping these early incarnations of your work under wraps can help ensure you keep writing and finish the draft so you can begin the editing process.
What a Mess!
When working on a draft, I do my best to keep moving forward and not go back to make any changes. If I have ideas for changes I’d like to make to chapters, sequences, or dialogue, I’ll make a note of it and keep moving my way to the end of the draft.
This means that there will inevitably be plot holes, lackluster dialogue, weak description, and other horribly written elements. But here’s the big thing to remember even if what you’ve written is garbage: it’s written.
Now you can take that mess of a draft, start for Chapter One, and begin making it better. This is why keeping these early drafts to yourself is critical; prying eyes also have unwanted opinions, and those are best left silenced during this phase of any writing project.
Organized Chaos
As you edit, revise, and improve your story, you’ll notice where elements work and where things that sounded good in your outline no longer make any sense entirely written out. You’ll have to make changes and alter story beats to make things flow, but that’s all part of the process.
At this point, your manuscript is in a state of organized chaos since you now have a completed draft of your story, but it still has a way to go until it’s ready for another reader’s eyes and opinions. You now have a literal work-in-progress that now has the potential to become even better than you initially planned since everything is out of your head and in front of you to fix and polish.
When Should Others Get Involved?
Once you come to a point in the writing process where everything has come together and the story and all its elements flow for you as you read through, it may be time to let another person have a look and offer their insights. You may have minor tweaks or polishes that still need to be done, but having this second set of eyes can now help you see things that may be missing or need improvement.
Make sure this person has an opinion you trust and value, someone who will provide constructive criticism and help improve the work. Even at this phase, you may feel the project isn’t 100% ready, but having this new viewpoint will help you continue the process to make it the best it can be.
Final Thoughts
The early drafting phases can be chaotic, so it’s crucial to keep these versions to yourself until you’ve revised to the point that a trusted reader can be looped in to provide feedback that will strengthen what you’ve produced.
Your manuscript should remain a classified document until you’re ready to disclose its contents to anyone other than yourself.
Happy Writing, and I’ll see you next time!
For this reason, keeping these early incarnations of your work under wraps can help ensure you keep writing and finish the draft so you can begin the editing process.
What a Mess!
When working on a draft, I do my best to keep moving forward and not go back to make any changes. If I have ideas for changes I’d like to make to chapters, sequences, or dialogue, I’ll make a note of it and keep moving my way to the end of the draft.
This means that there will inevitably be plot holes, lackluster dialogue, weak description, and other horribly written elements. But here’s the big thing to remember even if what you’ve written is garbage: it’s written.
Now you can take that mess of a draft, start for Chapter One, and begin making it better. This is why keeping these early drafts to yourself is critical; prying eyes also have unwanted opinions, and those are best left silenced during this phase of any writing project.
Organized Chaos
As you edit, revise, and improve your story, you’ll notice where elements work and where things that sounded good in your outline no longer make any sense entirely written out. You’ll have to make changes and alter story beats to make things flow, but that’s all part of the process.
At this point, your manuscript is in a state of organized chaos since you now have a completed draft of your story, but it still has a way to go until it’s ready for another reader’s eyes and opinions. You now have a literal work-in-progress that now has the potential to become even better than you initially planned since everything is out of your head and in front of you to fix and polish.
When Should Others Get Involved?
Once you come to a point in the writing process where everything has come together and the story and all its elements flow for you as you read through, it may be time to let another person have a look and offer their insights. You may have minor tweaks or polishes that still need to be done, but having this second set of eyes can now help you see things that may be missing or need improvement.
Make sure this person has an opinion you trust and value, someone who will provide constructive criticism and help improve the work. Even at this phase, you may feel the project isn’t 100% ready, but having this new viewpoint will help you continue the process to make it the best it can be.
Final Thoughts
The early drafting phases can be chaotic, so it’s crucial to keep these versions to yourself until you’ve revised to the point that a trusted reader can be looped in to provide feedback that will strengthen what you’ve produced.
Your manuscript should remain a classified document until you’re ready to disclose its contents to anyone other than yourself.
Happy Writing, and I’ll see you next time!
