I'm very new to screenwriting but I can agree that prep is key. In my limited (2 months) of learning the craft, my true allies have been my whiteboard and cork board/3x5" cards (along with books I've picked up). I've spent many a night coming up with my outline and filling out my beat sheet. While not as fun as writing, I know it will make my writing more fluid and personal. I can't wait to start writing but I didn't want to stumble half way through and give up. I feel confident now that my story is in my place and it is up to me to make it come to life.

Hi Scott. I didn't even know you'd responded to this. Very cool. I do extensive prep work and don't disagree with your suggestion screenwriters use it. Not at all. In fact, I just came across Lew Hunter's book he signed for me over a very informative dinner (first edition!). A friend of mine has a very popular book using some of his suggestions, especially beat sheets, and I routinely recommend her book to other novelists. Jumping into FD and taking a whack at scenes and some dialogue is no different than writing those things down on a piece of paper. Testing, seeing if I'm close to the different voices, but not for structure or finding the story. I do use the trusty note cards, a corkboard, a white board, and until it disappeared, rolls of butcher paper. A lot of what is written in FD (I used to use a different software) is printed with a laser printer, cut up, marked up, noted, and put on something as big as I can find to see the script unfolding (I miss the butcher paper). I think seeing the script is critical, and that can't be done by just sitting there and writing. Scriptwriting is physical, at least for me. Finding the story and the theme are very difficult. I always start with an idea of the theme, but it's through the prep work that I discover what's really there. This was a lesson learned very early as a writer. After finishing three major works, acquiring an agent, a publisher, and then moving on to screenplays, it struck me that there was a theme running through all the works I had never once thought of in my daily life as a human being. It was an issue I thought was a non-issue. I was lucky enough to participate in a Q&A with Robert Stone at the height of his career and asked him if he'd ever discovered anything about himself through his writing that surprised him. His reaction was as if he'd been punched in the stomach. He took a moment, gathered himself, and simply said, "Yes. Next question." There's magic in writing, but as any good magician knows, it takes a tremendous amount of practice and hard work to pull off that magic without showing your hand. And I do believe we can do our prep work, dig down for theme and human connection and universal truths, yet still be riding on the surface of our own story. It's something, if we're lucky, that unfolds with a body of work. Something we can't stop from coming out. I don't disagree with prep work at all, but I do believe that prep is different for different people. Oh, my goodness. I'm such a believer in prep and structure and the freedom of form that a producer from New Zealand ripped me to shreds in a scriptwriting group on Facebook. She went for blood and wasn't shy about doing it at all, saying if I were in *her* room on a project and suggested prep and beats and structure, she'd throw me out. Despite having most of the people in the group asking me to come back, I just knew I was in the wrong place and have stayed away since then.

I'm prep-guy myself. As far as I know, prep is relly differ for each of us. Whould you consider numerous of drafts a prep writing? I think even for the ones who don't do prep, there's still prep somewhere :) I remeber also this scene from Kevin Smith's somewhere: Banky: "I just want you to know that I respect your work as an artist. I'm something of an artist myself. I... I was the inker on the comic book." Then Chris Rock goes: "Yo, man, you a tracer, okay? Nobody else got the heart to tell you. You trace. You go around the lines. You are a tracer, okay? You think Fat Albert had a tracer? No! Bill Cosby did the whole thing with a roller, and it was excellent!" This "tracer" makes me laugh ). I hope some will enjoy as well, and others will reconsider their creative process. Cheers!

Cyd, butcher paper at Amazon... 48in x 200ft white 24in x 900ft white 36in x 900ft white They have colors too.

Yay, Jerry. Thanks. I should've known Amazon had it :-)

If there was one thing I wish I could impress on newbie writers, it would be: do your prep! Find the way that works for you, sure (my process is probably looser than some people's, and more rigorous than others, but it works for me), but do it. That said, there are bound to be a few writers for whom prep just doesn't work. But claiming you're one of them can also be an easy excuse for shirking the tough part of writing - so have a good go at prep on a couple of projects before dismissing it.

As a cautionary tale, I can attest to the fact that insufficient Prep can cause you problems many months and pages later. Due to the nature of my employment, and attempting to meet deadlines, I did not do thorough Prep and this began to cause me problems while writing the first draft. Now, during rewriting, many months later, I still find problems which are directly traceable to that rushed Prep. My biggest lesson - by a long, long way - on this current script : Do Proper Prep! It'll be different next time...

One of my favorite methods of sating that weird 'itchy trigger finger' we writers have is to write the first 10 pages. Always. Write your opening. What's nice is that it gets that 'I gots ta' write me some pages' urge out of the way AND more often than not, every single problem and issue your story has will come spilling out before you hit page 10. Dozens of questions, both character and plot related, will present themselves and you simply will not have the answer. And why didn't you have the answer kiddies? Say it with me... "I didn't do my prep work." This method has worked great for me for some time now. Reduces every cocky and cavalier "I'm too good for prep writing" attitude to a humble "get me to my notecards ASAP, I want to hide behind my wipe board..."

Have a go at this article: http://www.indiewire.com/article/screenwriters-compass-excerpt?page=1#articleHeaderPanel

Despina, I actually agree with most of what Gallo says here. Outlines SHOULD be malleable. When you move into page-writing, you need to follow the contours of the path the STORY takes you on. And the single biggest key here, for me, is to ground everything in CHARACTERS. That is the single most important part of the prep-writing process as far as I'm concerned, the way I approach in my Prep workshop, and how I work with my own stories. If the plot emerges from your work with characters, it's their instincts, motivations, actions, and reactions that inform and evolve the structure of the story. I believe what Gallo is critiquing is the surface level approach to outlining which focuses primarily on structure, and by structure, they almost always mean plot. But plot divorced from or not grounded in character comes across as a formula, lifeless, and can restrict the creative flow. I'll probably do a follow-up post on this. My harping on prep-writing ought not be confused with me promulgating writers ending up with an outline that has in effect squashed their creativity. Rather it should be precisely the opposite, again at least the way I approach it with my Prep process: By going through it, you engage your characters, spend a huge amount of time sitting with them, interviewing them, writing bios, digging into their core essence, and most importantly determining your Protagonist's narrative destiny and how the other characters fit into that in an organic, natural, and supportive way. All of that is about the vitality and life-force of your story, not some thin, stifling outline. More later. Thanks for the link. Gallo's premise is one of those things where it seems like it might contradict my take, but it's actually quite the opposite. And it all comes from working with your characters.

BOY, do I have a ton to say about this. Thanks, Scott, for the Update and just the article in general. As per normal, this is vital advice for writers. Will tackle this on my blog a little later today - I think we mostly agree, though I have a couple of things to add ;)

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Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand here's my meandering response: http://www.geofflatulippe.com/?p=107

[...] And if one Apocalypse isn’t enough, we’ve got another in the form of comments made by Steven Spielberg about the inevitable “meltdown” of the Hollywood studio system. Geoff and I get our hands dirty with that one before appreciating and responding to this screenwriting post by Scott Myers at Go Into the Story. [...]