The Speed of Write

How Fast Do You Write?

I was reading a chapter in William Goldman’s Adventures in the Screentrade (which, by the way, is a great book on screenwriting by one of the all-time great screenwriters… also the man I heard was secretly responsible for Good Will Hunting, but you can draw your own conclusions on that) about the speed of writing and it prompted me to do this post.

Every writer seems to have his or her own thoughts about how quickly writing should happen. Some sit every day and force the words while other wait for inspiration to hit and, when it does, write for hours or even days straight. Personally, I’ve tried approaching writing every which way, but have found that if I break with a project I’m writing – that is, if I wind up having to take more than a day or two away from it for whatever reason – it most likely goes off the rails. Once I’m onto a book or a screenplay, I have to basically commit to working on it each and every day until it’s finished. For short stories and short scripts, I have to do them in one sitting.

Goldman says in his book that there’s a certain energy to starting and then getting through the work as quickly as possible and that the energy translates into the finished product. I would agree with that, especially when it comes to screenwriting.

I’ve always done a good amount of preparation before starting a new screenplay. I’ll have character bios and a decent outline ready to go.

Now, I’m in the outlining module of the ProSeries, and we are on our 6^th draft of our outlines. I’ll repeat, 6^th draft! It makes what I used to do to ‘prepare’ look as professional as a gorilla in a tie. For each pass, we’ve focused specifically on one element of our screenplays, until we’ve been as thorough as possible.

There is something to be said for the ‘just start with a loose idea and inspiration will come approach’… but what I’m finding is that inspiration will strike even in the outlining phase, and in the outlining phase, it’s easy to revise. Things can be moved around, reworked, or flat-out changed at little cost to your time. This doesn’t mean that you might not be struck by some new idea to add in later, when you’re writing, but it does mean that the overall foundation of your story is going to be solid enough that A) You’ll have a better chance of finishing and B) It’s going to have a sound storyline that won’t take years of revision to fix.

I think the real benefit of all the outlining, though, is that by the time I get to the writing phase, I’m going to be able to get through all the writing quickly, with a completed screenplay in a matter of weeks. And I agree with Goldman in that there’s an energy, once you start writing, that you don’t want to lose. Stepping away for days or weeks at a time pretty much guarantees that you will lose that energy. The more prepared you are before beginning, the less likely that is to happen, because you always know what’s coming next in your story, how you want to handle it, and how you want the audience to feel.

***Now for a few quick, exciting updates! This past week I had two great pieces of news. First, my short story ‘Not There’ was accepted for publication in the January 2013 edition of All Things Girl, an online literary magazine and print anthology series (www.allthingsgirl.com). Second, my short film, Chance, is an official selection of the Williamsburg International Film Festival, which is taking place in Brooklyn from Sept. 20-23!

I’ll keep you all posted on both the scheduled show-times and the release of the short story!