Rip it up and start again

Lessons learned from taking wrong turns.

This is something I don't often talk about, because it's a phenomenon that presents as failure, however much I tell myself it's part of the writing process. But it happened yesterday. Again. And now I have a forum to discuss these things, so let's get into it...

It's my preference to start writing without much in the way of a plan. There's a minimal checklist I need before starting a script:

• Some notion of the first scene

• Some notion of the main character

• Some notion of the tone

• Some notion of waypoints; bits of story that I think are coming up later

That's pretty much it. If I know where I'm starting, who I'm traveling with, and what some of the stops along the way might look like, then I'm good to go.

No one would really advise this. Most screenwriting manuals talk about structure and outlines and treatments, and any kind of paid development process pretty much bakes those steps in. But I find that locking down too much in advance destroys the magic of discovery. I like to explore the story, to find new interesting things along the way, and I can't do that effectively in note form; I need to be actually writing scenes and dialogue in order to surprise myself with where things go.