Screenwriting class is in session over at Paul Guyot’s blog, where today he is talking about the importance of rewriting. Lots of aspiring screenwriters don’t give much thought… or effort…to rewriting. They focus all of their attention on having a killer opening. Mistake.
Nobody seems to want to learn to be a great writer anymore. They just want to
learn how to get paid to do it.But what few seem to grasp is that you
seriously increase your chances of getting paid for it if you’re really good at
it. And one of the best ways to "get good" is to understand rewriting, and know
that when you think you’ve done all you can, you can still do more.
It took me a long time to realize the value of rewriting, after thinking for ages that I could crank a book out in one shot like Larry Block or Spillane. Methinks maybe they tell tall tales about their work habits because I don’t see how they do it that way. Thanks for linking to the “class” – I plan to catch up.
Yeah, but… give me a break. Anyone that doesn’t understand that writing is rewriting hasn’t made a sincere effort to be a writer. Early in any writers life it becomes intuitively obvious you need cartian things to pull it off. You need input from other people to improve your work. You need distance away from your draft to gain objectivity. You need to polish and refine the work to a seemingly endless degree to make it competitive. Screenwriters work on one script for three years and then don’t get a greenlight. Kind of thing happens all the time. Wannabees are simply not prepared for the reality of the business. It’s TOUGH.
And by “cartian,” I meant “certain.”
The reluctance to re-write made more sense before the era of word processing, when changing a paragraph either meant a lot of cross-outs and white-outs, or re-typing pages.
Thanks for this.
For me re-writing and revising text is always the most interesting and engaging aspect of the whole process, and to some extent the most creative aspect.