Mark Duplass On The Talking Draft Method at SXSW

Duplass: 
“A couple of tricks when you’re writing, I find it’s very bad to write in Final Draft or in a document because you can see what you’re writing. And you’re thinking to yourself, “Oh God, it’s garbage, it’s garbage,” and you lose all your confidence.

So try this trick where you take a little dictaphone or a handheld recorder, and you speak out your scripts into it.

You can’t see the words. Also, you can’t turn back, it’s linear. And so what you actually have to do is – it forces you to just get a vomit draft out. And you accept, because this is a vomit draft, it’s going to be stinky; that’s fine, no big deal.

So your dialogue will all sound the same, because you’re talking that way. And your scene descriptions will not be eloquent, because you talk them out. But you’re gonna get impeccable pacing because your body knows how to pace the movie because you’ve sat in front of so many movies.

And so then you can click into that other side of your brain, the “this is no good” brain, and start empirically editing that thing. And that’s a nice little trick for me.”

Duplass lays out a great case for how dictation helps you avoid the most common “first draft trap” …editing while you write. Learn more about how we customized Duplass’ simple trick.