The Talking Draft Method: Hollywood’s Secret for a Fast First Draft

INTRODUCTION

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Use The Talking Draft Method For A Fast First Draft

The Talking Draft Method is the fastest way for playwrights or screenwriters to create scenes. The steps are simple:

A writer records audio of themselves improvising all the dialogue and the action lines,

The audio is transcribed,

The text is reformatted into a script.

This is not new, it is actually one of old Hollywood’s best-kept secrets. Some of the most prolific writers have used the Talking Draft Method to quickly produce first drafts and dialogue-heavy scenes. But few can afford the full-time stenographers these A-list writers have while they record themselves acting out a scene. Until now.

Screenwriters and technologists have finally customized tools to easily create fast first drafts for the screen using the Talking Draft Method.

This book will explain the history and science behind the Talking Draft Method, and it will provide a helpful guide for screenwriters setting out to write their first drafts.

Your finished first draft is the goal of this book. All of the techniques and tricks described in this book are engineered to get you creating your first drafts fast. The website application that accompanies this book at www.TalkingDraft.com is also engineered for your fast first drafts.

But finishing your first draft is not the end of your journey – it is only the beginning of the dozens of rewrites that every script always needs. Subsequently, this book will also help you on that larger quest; by the end of the book you will be armed with some of the best outlining and revision approaches currently in use by industry pros.

The easiest way to get good is to become prolific. It takes practice. The Talking Draft Method is the absolute easiest way to achieve prolificacy. So learn The Talking Draft Method, crank out your stories, and become great. You have it in you – let’s hear it.

WHEN

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When Howard Hawks Invented the Method

The Talking Draft Method dates to the Golden Age of Hollywood.

The story goes that in 1934, novelist William Faulkner’s Hollywood career was circling the drain. His friend, film director Howard Hawks came to the rescue.

Howard Hawks knew there was an executive at MGM hungry to get Hawks under contract, so on a Friday, Hawks whetted the executive’s appetite saying that Hawks had decided what he wanted his next two projects to be, and that he would deliver the screenplays next week.

Hawks quickly optioned the rights to two of Faulkner’s short stories. So Hawks temporarily had the permission to develop the stories into film scripts, and if he successfully sold the projects to a studio, then Faulkner would get a big payday.

Hawks then borrowed a massive reel-to-reel audio tape recorder the size of a refrigerator called a Marconi Machine from the BBC and brought the hulking pile of technology to an empty office at MGM.

On Saturday morning, Hawks and Faulkner sat down and wrote two screenplays in one weekend. How exactly Hawks achieved this feat begins to give shape to understanding the Method.

Firstly, whenever a storyteller is free to speak as freely as they wish, then tight, prescribed outlining becomes even more paramount to the task. Some raconteurs ramble, Hawks surely knew this about his friend.

Howard Hawks came into the empty office armed with Faulkner’s stories already annotated. Notably, the short stories did not have much dialogue. Hawks had underlined the most vital bits of narrative action in Faulkner’s prose and marked places where dialogue needed to be added.

Hawks’ markups of Faulkner’s stories included arrows and numerals to reorder sections of the prose, keeping the stories inside tight Hollywood structures. Hawks turned on the audio recording machine. Using these markups as his outline, Hawks began reading the opening Action sentences of the first scene into the microphone. Faulkner simply watched as Hawks set up the scene.

As the voice recorder rolled tape, the director came to the first point in the story where a scene needed new dialogue. Hawks simply tilted the microphone towards Faulkner and encouraged him with a nod. Faulkner then improvised new dialogue to flesh out the moment. Hawks interjected occasionally to add action lines.

Scene-by-scene, the two fleshed out Faulkner’s concise short stories hewing to Hawks’ notes. When Faulkner was creating the new dialogue, he spoke as all the characters in each scene - as if performing the conversation by himself, eyes closed. No he said, she said.

Soon, Faulkner was doing both — dictating new action lines and acting-out new dialogue, even donning the voices of the different characters in his mind’s eye.

Once Faulkner was up to speed, Hawks’ task turned to merely keeping Faulkner to his Hollywood outline. The two friends acted and worked their way through both stories in that little room. They wrapped the weekend with two finished feature scripts on the reels of audio tape. The first drafts, at least.

That is the second most important aspect of the Talking Draft Method after outlining: momentum. Forward momentum is the power behind the first draft. One must move forward, only forward, until the story is done.

Legend has it that on Monday, a stenographer typed up all the audio tapes. Then those pages were reformatted by MGM’s script assistants. Satisfied with the drafts, Hawks’ producers at the studio cut a check to Faulkner, thus keeping him afloat.

The projects fell through, as nearly all do, but that didn’t matter. Hawks’ intervention was a success. William Faulkner was on his feet - from 1934 to 1954 Faulkner went on to work on around 50 films.

Over the decades since Howard Hawks, many writers in Hollywood have used some version of this trick to crank out a fast first draft. For a while, the Talking Draft Method was even named after Howard Hawks.

But Howard Hawks did not invent storytellers using dictation, nor did he even invent using technology to assist in the act of dictating a narrative. No, Hawks may have introduced this method of writing to the art form of film, but the history of speech-to-text is older than the Bible.

The history of storytellers dictating their tales is ancient and storied...

WHO

The Honor Roll of Story Dictation

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If you believe the legend, Greek poet Homer probably dictated the entire Iliad and Odyssey because, according to tradition, he was blind.

Throughout the centuries since, some of the greatest storytellers in the world created many of their classics by talking. It’s no surprise that so many of those who became proficient at dictation also became hugely prolific. This is because not only does the Talking Draft Method help you finish your first draft faster than any other method, but because the first draft usually takes the longest time to write with traditional methods, it stands to reason that those who talk their first drafts end up getting far more work done over the course of their careers because they are not hung-up as often by the first draft trap.

Sometimes, it may be a physical impairment