After three months of rewriting I'm proud to announce that we published the third draft of the script today. Every scene was changed in some way in a full top to bottom rewrite. We gave Marc a better arc for why he moved to New York that spoke to the overall themes of the story and, as a whole, expanded the story arcs of Sally and Wesley's friends. The casting process in particular was extremely helpful to us in fleshing out who these characters were as we got to talk about the characters in the audition room and put faces with names. As a result many of the secondary characters have been fleshed out to the point of becoming main characters with their own tiny arcs.
It was a huge overhaul with no scene left behind. In a quick estimate we cut 17 scenes and wrote 27 brand new scenes for this draft, which even if you exclude what were often large revisions to the scenes that stayed in the script that means at a minimum 42% of what's on the page was written in just the last few months. If I hadn't been working on this script for the last year and a half I would probably feel shaken by how much has changed so quickly, but I've learned in the last eight months that some of the best discoveries in the writing process come in a flurry of writing as you try to get it all down as fast as you can.
What I refer to as the first draft of the script came after a year of writing six days a week in a burst of 7,200 words in which the entire story was re-envisioned beginning to end in a single two hour focused burst at the computer. Major anchor points of the story were uprooted and the script became something dramatically and irreversibly different from what it had been just a short time before—and it was better for it.
The last three months, even as the story changes have remained just as big, has felt like the more mature version of that. The story as it stands today has never rung more true and I've never been more proud of something I've written than what's in this script. It's also a good feeling to know that after a year and a half of steady work at this I have never been a better writer than I am today and it'll probably surprise you to hear that it's an even better feeling to know that that still means I'm probably not very good, but I can say that because I know that I'll be a better writer a year from now and an even better writer the year after that when I tackle my next project.
So here's to the third draft and all the images and all the words ahead!