The First Draft

The first draft of The Seymours is now complete. I was surprised that it took less than a month and that was not full time. The Times did a feature on scriptwriting and interviewed a number of writers. Lee Hall (Billy Elliot) says a first draft "doesn't take long, about ten days. A screenplay is normally 100 pages". That is a minute a page. Mine happens to be 97 at the moment. He goes on "I never look back while writing the first draft, I get too depressed at the gap between my aspiration and the outcome. It always appears frightfully mundane, unevocative, gauche, unfilmable, unreadable, unwatchable." (I know how he feels). "At the end you go back and go through it and through it again". I suppose I had better get going.