It was easy in graduate school. Bring your pages to class, ask questions, get thoughtful responses from ten people at a time. Set up an appointment with your professor, come in, take notes.
Not so, now. If you're lucky (and I was, for a while), you're in a play group where you get to bring in pages to some smart, talented peers. But that's necessarily on a schedule, and people are busy, and if you're getting feedback on pages once every few months, that's great -- but it may or may not line up with your writing schedule.
I really only had to get my act together, and get proactive about my drafting and feedback process, once I was out of grad school at UT Austin, and out of Ars Nova. I made a commitment to writing more (and took a steep pay cut at my job to do so, which has been holding my feet to the fire), and soon realized that there was only so much I could do on my own.
My favorite professors have always said "be your own worst critic," and I try to be, but it really really helps to have the perspective of people who aren't buried in the work alongside me. So. In the past three months, on three different projects, I've been employing three very different feedback/revision techniques:
(1) One-on-one. I'm working on a film, with a production company. The development executive I'm working with, who is wonderful and who has become one of my favorite new New York friends, gave me terrific page-one-to-one-hundred feedback on the first two drafts. But going into the third draft, I asked her if she'd be willing to give me feedback ONE ACT AT A TIME. She was. So we identified what felt "off" about Act One, I revised it, she gave me feedback, I revised it -- then we moved on to Act Two, then Act Three. The nice thing was, by the time we moved on to the subsequent act, we knew the preceding one was solid. This really may only have worked because the (fantastic) reader in question has a big stake in the script -- she, too, wants it to get made -- but it's incredibly rewarding, makes a script very solid very fast, and really makes you feel like you've got someone on your team.
(2) The Kitchen Table Method. I talked about this in an earlier post. I'm working on a new play. No one's waiting for it; it's just one I wanted to write. So once I hit what I *thought* was the last page, I invited a bunch of deeply trusted folks, mostly actors, over to read the thing aloud. I fed them. A few were friends with each other, so it gave them a chance to catch up. It helped us all feel like part of a community. I think it gave them the (correct) sense that I highly value both their talents and their thoughts. And they gave me terrific feedback, informed by all of their time working on other peoples' plays. I wrote a new draft, invited over a slightly different crew (for fresh eyes' sake). And so on. I'm on the third round now (the first I'm willing to call a real first draft) and it's starting to look like a play -- AND I've managed to deepen some friendships along the way, with people I really value.
(3) The Crowd-Source Method. In mid-December, my manager was finally happy enough with my crazy pilot outline that he said "okay, go to script." BUT -- he wants that script very soon. And I want it to be good, because he's never seen me write for TV. Not enough time for kitchen table reads, and I definitely need outside eyes. So as I got close to the end of my zero draft, I emailed a few (3-4) friends around the country, writers with experience in the genre, and asked if they could do a 2-4 day turnaround on feedback. They said yes. I (barely) managed to get it to them when I said they would, and they got me feedback within a few days. I rewrote for five days straight, and did the same thing -- but this time, with a second group of friends, to get fresh eyes. By this third draft, I *will* send it to my manager, but will also send it to a couple of my very demanding writer friends, so that I will have their feedback *and* my manager's to work from when he (inevitably) asks for a rewrite. All told, about fifteen people will have given feedback on this pilot before it hits the desk of anyone in the industry.
I've also found a method that has helped me to move more efficiently through a rewrite. Which is obvious, and which I guess I've done in some fashion before, but with the amount of rewriting I've been doing lately, it's solidified. I've always used a "punch list," a bullet-pointed list of things I need to work on or revisit in the rewrite. But I've started breaking that list out by act (in the case of movies and TV) and scene (in the case of plays), one page per act or scene, with one extra page for the bigger, longer-thread stuff. It helps ENORMOUSLY.
No comments:
Post a Comment