Warren Ellis –

THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT was a medium that I haven’t, strictly speaking, worked in before, so there was A Plan for it. The plan was: Deliberately Carelessly Bad First Drafts. In this method, the goal is to just get to the end while having everything make some kind of vague sense. Once you see the script as a whole, you can fix it up, but you have to get to the end of the script first without constantly second-guessing yourself as to whether you’re nailing it or not.

You have to let yourself be Bad At It. Empty out everything you’ve been thinking about the job on to the page and don’t worry about whether it’s any good or not. You need it all out in front of you so you can see it all properly in all its horror.

Ideally, you should never show those drafts to anyone. But I have two trusted co-producers, so I sent them on for notes, which help clarify the rewrite goals. Sometimes you want to be left alone to sort it out yourself, sometimes you know that it’s Wrong in so many particulars that you want extra eyes on it to catch all the Wrongs.