Leslye Headland has a saying she finds useful when embarking upon a new screenplay: “The first draft is a dangerous neighborhood. You shouldn’t be wandering there alone.”
To the acclaimed filmmaker, best known for the Netflix series Russian Doll and recent Star Wars series The Acolyte, your first pass at a script is always destined to be imperfect. Listen to the full episode below to discover many more…
Getting Through the First Draft
“Finish the first draft. Just finish it!” she insisted when I spoke to her for my podcast Script Apart this week.
Spend too long mulling over every line of dialogue in search of instant perfection, and the likelihood is you’ll never get past that draft. Instead, it’s better to write as quickly as possible. Don’t loiter. Get out alive.
“Don’t go back and start editing. I know it’s tempting but the best thing you can do is write the bad version of the script. Use lines from other movies. Use the dumbest lines you can think of. Sometimes, put in something in brackets: ‘Say something here about the language of love.’ And then move on. Just don’t get stuck in that first draft,” Headland laughed, as we talked through how her first draft of The Acolyte pilot was—by her own admission—”terrible,” bogged down in Game of Thrones-esque politics about the Jedi order that she ultimately cut as she rewrote.
Variations of this advice have existed as long as screenwriting has been a profession, and understandably so—nothing saps the excitement from a story you were eager to tell like laboring over the first draft for too long. Something about Headland’s way of putting it though, imagining a first draft as a “dangerous neighborhood,” made that advice resonate with me more than ever before, however.
You can improve an imperfect finished script. The same can’t be said for a screenplay that doesn’t really exist yet, because there’s not yet a completed draft. Which is why from now on, I’ll be approaching my first draft imagining it as a trip to Tatooine: a wretched hive of scum and villainy, as a famous Jedi once described it.
Try it yourself to see how it unlocks the force of your first draft.
Listen to the full episode of Script Apart, supported by ScreenCraft, WeScreenplay, and Final Draft, above.
Read More: What Screenwriters Can Do When Lost in the First Draft
Check out our Preparation Notes so you start your story off on the right track!
Al Horner is a London-based journalist, screenwriter and presenter. His work has appeared in The Guardian, Empire Magazine, GQ, BBC, Little White Lies, TIME Magazine and more.
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Author: Al Horner
