What Writing a Second Draft Feels Like

I sit at my desk. I sit on my couch, my bed, on the floor, on the bus, the train, the sunny bench in the park… and I write my screenplay’s second draft. I hem and I haw. Thoughts about what I should add, what I should take out, crossing my mind every moment, sneaking up on me, filling the blank spaces in-between school, and work, and everything else. If I thought I was a perfectionist writing my first draft, I am something beyond that now.

 

The first draft is where you spill all your ideas, with no hesitation, creating magic on the page as you worry little about the length, the jumble of words, everything, because you will go back and change it later. Or will you? Creating a first draft of anything is a delicate art. You are putting your thoughts into a time and physical place, bringing them to life for the first time. Exciting but also the most terrifying concept imaginable. After months and sometimes years of brainstorming and dreaming up a new world for your delicate characters to explore and struggle and grow, you can finally put your wildest dreams and thoughts onto a pristine, empty white page.

 

For all the challenges and lost-in-thought moments that go into writing a first draft, there is always the calming thought of knowing that nothing has to be deleted or changed, or debated. That is a problem for later. There is freedom. Endless amounts of it. There is an inherent magic in a first draft that I worry will be destroyed or changed to the point of no return in my second. I am afraid of shattering the delicate barrier between the first and second draft. A second draft is already daunting a task as it is. Maybe even more so than the first. And a second draft of a screenplay is almost something else entirely. What if I lose the personality, the magic, the charm? I second-guess myself. Would a character say that or should they say this? If I change this will the story lose the qualities that made my heart long to tell it in the first place? Will I become bored and move on to another first draft that will never become a second? Do I really know my characters and story well enough to be making these changes? I know what I want to add, and what I want to change, and I think I know what I need to take away. I have been thinking about the changes ever since writing my first draft. If I’m being honest, I have been thinking about the changes before even writing my first draft but I wanted to get my first idea down just in case. To make sure I would make the right decision in my second draft.

 

I hold everything in my hands delicately, knowing how quickly it could fall apart in my grasp. But I can’t bring myself to do it. I can’t take away the parts that brought so much joy and frustration and sadness when I wrote them, when I spent long moments between park benches and bus stops and grocery aisles mulling them over and over again in my head. The characters living rent-free in my mind. Filling my notebooks with scribbled thoughts and my purses with crumpled receipts and stray papers, stained with the ink from stray pens. I want to add this, I want to add that. But what if I hate it tomorrow? Or even worse, what if I love it even more than the first thing? What if I love them both equally? I will have to make sacrifices. I will have to live with not knowing what could have come from keeping that piece in the final draft. What laughter and joy it could have brought someone. What if I overlook something magical? Is there really anything magical to overlook in the first place? Is that it? Is the fear of meeting our "failures" and "weaknesses" holding everything back? I am dealing with hypotheticals and what-ifs. I will forever be haunted by what could have been.

 

The truth is, no one will ever know what made it from the first draft to the second and the third and the fourth and the fifth, and sixth and seventh, and so on. And no one will ever know the evolution. How a scene became the scene. Only I will ever know what was and what is now. Only I will know what a character almost said, but surely thought or what a character did between scenes a and b or where they went or how they got to where they are now. I have to be okay with the truth that no one will ever know my characters and my world in the same way I do. All anybody else will ever know are the pieces that I have carefully compiled together, and spent countless sleepless nights and daydreams constructing. But that doesn’t mean they don’t see it in a special, magical, and heartbreaking way either. That is just the thing. As much as the characters and story are mine they are yours. What does it matter if someone sees a character differently than I do? The character isn’t mine anymore and wasn’t ever mine to begin with. Is that why so many writers get stuck? Are we afraid of putting our work out there, or afraid of it no longer belonging to us? Are these one and the same?

 

I must bring myself to do it. The excitement is there again. What is so scary? I can always go back to the first draft. I’m not deleting anything. At least not physically. I am giving myself the opportunity to make the story better. I am giving myself options. Is it the idea of having options that make it so difficult? Could it be easier to just let the new thoughts and ideas linger in my mind as the first draft goes out into the world instead of having those thoughts and ideas expressed on the page, so close yet so far from seeing the light of day? Is it easier to have those ideas in my mind so that one day they will fade from memory? Is having physical evidence of what could have been too much to handle? Too much to hold on to?

 

As I prepare my notes, my thoughts, all the ideas I have dreamt up while finishing my first draft bubble to the surface like they did before, ready to be brought to life on the page. I want my characters to meet my new ideas and see how my ideas mix, or don’t mix, with the old ones. The excitement is back. Which also means the nerves are back. But now there is the second-guessing, the questioning. The silent dread in the back of my mind, and the sometimes all-consuming dread, that I am changing a story that is truly a piece of who I am. And therefore I am changing a part of myself. I have seen these characters through everything, and in a way, I have grown alongside them. The story has become a part of who I am. I have lived with the story. The story has become a piece of the puzzle. Without it, I feel something missing. But for as much as I know that the story is the missing piece, I know I have more to say, more to show. The missing piece for me has missing pieces of its own, and neither will be complete without a second draft.

 

What I have discovered though is that every final draft has missing pieces. Maybe not as many as the first or the second, but missing pieces nonetheless. No final draft is perfect. An obstacle for any perfectionist, but an inevitable one. Writing goes out into the world with missing pieces, whether or not we are aware of it. The truth is, we become the missing pieces for other stories, and in time, our puzzle will be complete as others transform our story and characters into something beyond what we could have imagined in those sweet daydreams and early days of scribbling in notebooks and grocery store receipts.