How many times have you heard this uplifting piece of wisdom? … “Of all the screenwriters working on scripts right now:

• 95%+ will never finish them
• 95%+ of the scripts that are finished will be crap.”

Do you think it’s true? Could this crude utterance be a fair diagnosis of why most wannabe screenwriters never graduate from that category? If so, it’s encouraging in a way, isn’t it?

Personal experience and anecdotal testimony do seem to support it. So let’s hash out what it takes to overcome this preliminary and seemingly insurmountable obstacle standing between us, the protagonists of our own stories and our (outer) goal of realizing a screenwriting career : Completing a script.

I’ve definitely wrestled with this beast, languishing for months in First Draft Hell; writing a scene, rethinking it for the next few days, writing it again, realizing changes I’d made in this scene had logical implications for previously written scenes and going back to rewrite those, contemplating  whether this scene really needed to be in there at all , etc. etc. All of this was adding up to a script that was never going to surface, relegating me squarely into category #1 above.

Then, while taking a fantastic online screenwriting course, my glaring flaw was illuminated: I wanted my first draft to be my final draft. I wanted near-perfection to pour out my fingers. I wanted every scene I typed to mesh with and complement the overall structure, and be the full realization of its purpose in the story. This had to be achieved before I would move on, and, in the end, all that would be left to do in subsequent drafts would be simple editing and changing a few character names to something more exotic, right? Oh, so wrong. This “on the fly” methodology might’ve worked for all those college papers, but this wasn’t some droning regurgitation of Pavlov’s salivating dogs’ contributions to the field of Psychology. A creative masterwork, that is also a marketable product worthy of a sizable monetary investment, wasn’t going to materialize this way. Not from me, anyway.

The monumentally important lesson I learned was to plow through. I was taught that a superior draft only comes after multiple inferior ones. I had to reach “The End” of draft 1 before it could ever be crafted into something worth reading.

I had to allow myself to write fluff. That’s right, pure garbage. My new goal was to cross the finish line, even if it meant writing fodder that WASN’T perfectly fleshed out in my head first. What I ended up with was a plot that included some good stuff, those nuggets of inspiration that had prompted me to start this script in the first place, rather than any of multitude of others in my head, screaming to get out. Oh yeah, those slices of ME that would make this something truly unique and moving, they were all in there. BUT, it was also packed with placeholder scenes, (Did I just coin a new term? If so, get it out there and let those sweet royalties come rolling in! If not, well, let’s move on…) scenes that were uninteresting, uneventful, riddled with cliches and throwaway dialog and actions; scenes that weren’t “there” yet,  and were only there to bridge those preceding and following them.

However, in case you haven’t been paying attention, what I had at this point was a COMPLETED first draft! So, consider me bumped out of category #1!

Since then I have found that editing, altering, and rearranging the placeholder scenes is much easier, more efficient, more productive, and far more rewarding than being stilted in mental anguish over a scene that’s stewing in my head and waiting for it to magically come together before typing it out. And another interesting thing happened. By banging out junk that I was almost certain would be transformed or cut later, some really great ideas spontaneously emerged! This previously untapped process took me in directions I never would’ve gone otherwise, and I’m sure a good deal of those gems will make it to the final draft!

So, here’s the thing folks: if you ask me, there’s no point in fighting Hemingway’s idea that “the only kind of writing is rewriting.” My advice is to get the thing written, even if parts of it are far, far, far from your best work. Get yourself to the rewriting stage, where the real process begins.

What do you think? Agree? Disagree? What did I leave out? What tribulations have you been through to complete that first draft? Let us know below!