Great video and thanks for posting. How cool is Rod Serling? He literally owns the room. I'm a sort of seat-of-the-pants first drafter myself. I usually have a sort of fuzzy mental one page outline which shines a dim light in the direction I want to go and I just pour the words onto the page. Then with draft two, I slash and burn. I keep coming across writers who outline meticulously and I envy their discipline but I find it quite limiting. I never make written notes before a first draft. I tend to lose focus and the ideas skitter away. All my ideas are kept in folders in my head. Subsequent drafts however, require vast forests of paper for notes. Many screenwriting blogs/books/websites encourage outlining, but it's not for everyone. Discipline is for the second draft. The first, for me, is total improvisation.

Lydia, sounds like you would enjoy reading Guillermo Arriaga (Amores Perros, 21 Grams):

“I never outline the story, never. I once went to a seminar by one of these gurus of the screen, and this person said, ‘You must know everything about your characters.’ I thought, ‘Fuck, there’s no way!’ I want to have dark parts of my characters’ history so they can surprise me. Also, I can’t have an ending already, because when I don’t know the characters they can show me the ending as I get to know them. That’s why I don’t like to do research of any kind. I like for the characters to grow up inside me. There are two kinds of writer: there are those who don’t have any kind of internal way to order things inside themselves, so they need structure, page thirty, page sixty, and so on — and I don’t blame or criticize the professors or the students of that discipline. But I think there is another kind of writer who has a different kind of approach to structure. 21 Grams goes back and forth all the time, and I had a perfect understanding of where it was going. I never got lost or thought that I needed a plot point here, or for something to happen in the second act. I never think that way. That’s not to say the other way is bad — it’s just that myself and other writers have a different internal process. It’s intuition.”

BTW he just started doing two day weekend screenwriting seminars. I'm sure you can find info on that if you hit Google. As I say, there is no right way to write.

Thanks Scott. I've seen the film of 21 Grams which I loved. I'll see if I can get my hands on the script.

I'm with you, Lydia - the ideas skitter away and start to feel about as unique as a pre-fab home. I think what a writer really needs to wrap his head around is the simply the basic ingredients a story needs.

Hi - I have a different approach - I do use outlines - it's a bit like a map/or sat nav through the story - I use the outline to guide - but it is not set in stone. Liz