Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it.
I write an actual script rather quickly – a draft will take me two weeks – but I write a lot of drafts. My big thing is I don’t re-read. When I write, I never re-read back. I’ll send it, because if I re-read back, it will cripple me.
I don’t sit down and write a song, and then slam down the phone like, ‘We got another one!’ and pop some champagne. It’s like if someone’s writing a novel: You write a series of drafts.
So much of writing is about what characters don’t say, and in the early drafts, sometimes things get overwritten.
When I began to write and used a typewriter, I went through three drafts of a book before showing it to an editor.
There’s a great deal of stripping away; in early drafts, I may say the same thing two or three times, and each may be appropriate, but I try to pick the best and improve it. I work on sound a great deal, and I will change a word or two, revise punctuation and line breaks, looking for the sound I want.
I had done 17 drafts of ‘Heyy Babyy’ before the final screenplay emerged. It’s actually based on the wild lifestyle of a friend. In fact, when he saw ‘Heyy Babyy’ he threatened to sue me and said I’d better pay him royalty.
It’s funny because you know the novel process: you get the drafts, you get the galley, and then you get the galley proofs. You have opportunities to change things all along. But the further along in the process you go, the more careful you have to be in making those changes, and the smaller the changes have to be.
I get a lot of fan mail addressed to Bilbo and sometimes Sir Bilbo – it’s hardly ever addressed to Ian Holm, in fact. My business manager drafts the replies, and then I pop in to the office and sign them, ‘Bilbo!’
I’ll play for whoever drafts me. I’m just not going to be presumptuous about what they want to do. It’s the draft.
Second, there were the discussions and drafts leading up to the White Paper on Employment Policy of 1944 in which the UK government accepted the maintenance of employment as an obligation of governmental policy.
Don’t dive into the weeds of mock drafts and rumors, because that’s all that they are. They’re just rumors.
It is simply not part of my culture to preserve notes. I have never heard of a writer preserving his early drafts.
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