Close the door, or the draft will give you a cold

Stupid Writing Man has just finished writing 'hand notes' on the current revision of the current draft of My Baby. He's now enjoying a dram of Johnny Walker Gold (chilled).

Stupid Writing Man has an interesting process - while he doesn't write scripts in long hand he prefers doing revisions with a hard copy and a pen. If he invents a new scene or dramatically alters one (pun intended), he'll firstly write out the changes in The Big Black Book (which he has collected a few of over the years), then.. if his hand doesn't hurt too much... transcribe them onto the back of the appropriate pages of the script.

While Stupid Writing Man will make structural comments in his handnotes he won't actually shift scenes around - that comes later. Internal Monologue* occasionally mutters that these handnotes amount to shifting deckchairs on the titanic, which perturbs Captain Fragile Ego somewhat... but if Stupid Writing Man is in The Zone™, he can usually keep the Insecurity Rays at bay.

After SWM has done his handnotes - which takes time - he'll sleep on them. Sometimes for one night, sometimes for longer. If he can't think of any more things to revise and he's done enough procrastination AKA mindbleaching**, he'll start the next stage. The next stage is, unsurprisingly, typing these handnotes up into the next revision. Of course, Stupid Writing Man often decides that he's gotten things wrong, and will make additional changes during this transcription process.

When SWM has done transcribing he may, if sufficiently motivated, move onto Structural Work. If he doesn't do so immediately, he'll return to the land of mindbleaching. Said Structural Work involves moving scenes around in Final Draft - following his early notes- and seeing how they read AND feel. Sometimes getting them working requires making even more subtle changes to scene transitions blah.

And this is why Hand Writing is important. On a superficial level, it removes Stupid Writing Man from distractions, but on a deeper level is serves as a permanent and physical record of a certain 'level' of changes (pre-digital). Stupid Writing Man occasionally finds it useful to go over his early revisions/drafts, reading his old notes, and discovering nuggets of wisdom which he, in his infinite stupidity, discarded.

Once a draft is finished, he'll e-mail to himself so there'll always be a copy in the aether of off-site storage (just in case).

Stupid Writing Man also has a habit of using mindbleaching to help his mnid change gears. When he's been spending his days as a mild-mannered VFX Whipcracker, he can often come home with brains full of stuff (like XSL Translation Layers), and mindbleaching is a great way to force him to stop thinking about work. Games are his preferred way of doing this because many of them are essentially non-linguistic - in fact, they're highly reptilian and visceral experiences - and, more importantly, they require concentration and interaction. These latter two things force him to be involved. This differs from watching a movie or tv or a play, where you can be present without being involved. (Digression Boy: "Note he didn't mention books") Games bleach his brains of words... which, rather ironically, is the best way to prepare for writing, he finds.

The real question is when does this current round of revisions (aka a draft) end?

* There are rumours that Internal Monologue is actually Dr. Cynic in disguise (Digression Boy - "Note the uncanny parallel of name-structure with Mr Rational. Could they possibly be the same person? c.f. Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde. Mr Rational response is: "STFU")

** Which, at this stage, is amounting to playing rounds of International Superstar Soccer Deluxe, writing blog entries, or drinking scotch.