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By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Nicole Holofcener's shitty first drafts
In the Reporter, Martin Grove asks Friends with Money‘s Nicole Holofcener about her writing habits. “”I’ve got a Mac and I write on Final Draft. I set my nice office up. I’ve got a view of my garden. My dog sits there. And, of course, I can’t work in there. I don’t know if you’re the same way. If I’m in my office, I’ll pay bills or fall asleep. So I prop myself up in a coffee shop generally with my laptop. Sometimes I’ll spend 10 or 15 minutes making notes about where the characters are and where they came from in terms of the scenes that I’ve already written and I’ll just start typing. I really encourage myself to be as stupid and bad as I can be. I really try to let myself be dumb about it because if I don’t I’ll be paralyzed. I even titled my folder ‘Shitty First Drafts,’ which I got from Anne Lamott. She wrote this terrific book called ‘Bird by Bird’ and it has helped me a lot over the years. It’s a book about how to write. She’s so funny and so brilliant… She might have had a chapter called ‘Shitty First Drafts’ and if you don’t let yourself write one you can’t write. I mean, that’s the way I am. And often the stuff that comes from the place that lets yourself play is the best stuff—not what comes from your head or an outline. That’s why I don’t use an outline—because it kills the spontaneity, it kills the life for me. And since my scripts are not plot-driven—but don’t tell anybody because I know no one really knows that!—I don’t need it. I think if I was writing a plot-driven script, I would absolutely need an outline and index cards. I used to waste a lot of time with index cards. They’re a really good thing if you don’t want to write and you just want to screw around. ‘Oh, I think I’m going to spend the day doing my cards.’ You know, you write these beautiful cards and they’re up on the wall and then you never look at them again. At least for me… I do the opposite of everything I was taught in film school [at Columbia University]. It’s funny. I guess teachers are so afraid they’re going to get this mess of 300 pages handed to them if they don’t do that [about using index cards to organize screenwriting].”