I'm a fairly fast, but sloppy writer, so I'm a big fan of re-writing, and re-writing again.
'A Fair Maiden' existed in notes and sketches for perhaps a year. When I traveled, I would take along with me my folder of notes - 'ideas for stories.' Eventually, I began to write it and wrote it fairly swiftly - in perhaps two months of fairly intense writing and rewriting. Most of my time writing is really re-writing.
When you give up a bit of work don't (unless it is hopelessly bad) throw it away. Put it in a drawer. It may come in useful later. Much of my best work, or what I think my best, is the re-writing of things begun and abandoned years earlier.
When I write something, I constantly rewrite.
I do a lot of revising on paper. Sometimes I think I should just write longhand - what I type reads very different once I print it out.
With TV, your first draft just doesn't matter. It's a skeleton, and then there's draft after draft after draft, and so many other factors influence it. It's just a whole different kind of storytelling.
The act of writing is either something the writer dreads or actually likes, and I actually like it. Even re-writing's fun. You're getting somewhere, whether it seems to move or not.
I improvise whenever I feel it's important, or whenever I think that something's there. It's nice to have a script that's so well-written that I don't have to improvise. I mean, I used to have to re-write whole movies; this is kind of nice.
I'm always writing. A friend of mine once said, 'You avoid re-writing by writing.' Which is kind of a good point, because re-writing seems to be mostly about craft, and writing is just, like, getting out your passion on a piece of paper.
For as long as writers have written, they've had second thoughts about their work.
Who wants to see the same play again? I certainly don't want to write the same play again and again.
There are certainly moments in the story room where you watch the movie die on the table. You put A next to B, and suddenly none of it lines up anymore. We feel that all the time. It's a terrible feeling.
