Screenwriting : How to Write a Vomit Draft by Maurice Vaughan

Good read!

Love this!

Thx for sharing, Maurice Vaughan. Solid read, and it's good to note that the vomit draft is not the same as the write-by-the-seat-of-your-pants draft, which lacks any organized planning as described in the article. It's more a stream of consciousness.

You're welcome, Ty Strange. "it's good to note that the vomit draft is not the same as the write-by-the-seat-of-your-pants draft." That part stuck out to me. I've been there. I opened Final Draft and nothing. Haha That's why I outline. I could probably write a script without an outline, but I'd at least need to know the logline, storylines, character goals, and the stakes.

Excellent, Maurice Vaughan. Having some sort of plan goes a long way.

Creating with words, paint, or clay is messy! Perfectionism? Control? Judgement? Let it go…Love the advice in The War of Art.

Anyone tried to clean up an vomit? It's a mess....I'd rather say do your best at first draft and then try getting better and better...

Maurice Vaughan Agreed, writing is better than not writing. If you have an idea, get it down rather than worry about how. I have a scratch pad that all my ideas for a script goes down, some of it is formatted as dialogue, some are descriptions and others are notes I make in line with ideas for the script. My master document is the script, ideas are inserted and then formatted to the script. It's not elegant but it's 'on paper'. It works for me, no doubt others will have different methods. All are valid, what works for you, works for you. But get it down.

A vomit draft is messy to clean up, Kiril Maksimoski, but having a messy first draft is better than not having a draft. As Angela said in the article, "The point of a vomit draft isn’t to write badly. It’s to allow yourself to write badly. You’re still obviously going to try to make your script great from the get-go – you’re not a crazy screenwriter. But by allowing yourself to use a cliché placeholder here and move past that on-the-nose dialogue over there, you allow yourself to keep moving forward, and that is the best way to clear the first draft finish line."

You're right, Greg ("What works for you, works for you"). And a scratch pad sounds like a great idea. Thanks.

"Let it go." I like that, Rhonda Jean Seiter. "Let it go and just write." That could be the slogan for first drafts. :) That reminds me of a picket sign idea I thought of yesterday. I'm not able to go picket, so I think of sign ideas and post them for people to use.

Darren Aronofsky calls it a "muscle draft" while Clive Frayne calls it an "intuitive" draft, both of which are better phrasings than "vomit draft."

I like "muscle draft," Larry. Do you know why he calls it a muscle draft?

Maurice Vaughan @Larry Guzman, I'd never heard of vomit draft before this post. It's not an elegant word and kind of does down the resulting writing.

Maurice Vaughan Here's the quote it's from: “First you start with an idea, then you start to flesh out the structure, and that’s a long process. I think that’s where we spend a lot of time, just figuring out the structure… all the acts… the beats of the story. And then comes the great leap which is the first draft, I call it ‘the muscle draft,’ where you just muscle it out. You don’t worry about what you’re missing, you just get through it, get to the end… You find that a lot of novice screenwriters will spend years on the first act and it’ll turn into the best first act in the world, but you need to have the whole picture. I think I read an interview with George Lucas saying that the best advice he got from Coppola was, ‘Just get through it.’” — Darren Aronofsky (From “Screenwriters’ Masterclass: Screenwriters Talk About Their Greatest Movies,” edited by Kevin Conroy Scott [via Scott Myers @ scottdistillery.medium.com].)

The vomit draft is the one you push through to get to Fade OUt. Once you get there... everything else is editing.

Thanks, Larry. The name makes sense now. And yeah, "muscle draft" sounds better than "vomit draft." I might start using "muscle draft," or think of my own term. :)