Screenwriting 101: Meg LeFauve

“I just open a document and start brain dumping anything I can think of, all my questions, all my inspiration, all my ideas. Then I go back and read over it and cull it, and add more questions, more ideas. Eventually, I hopefully find a core. At least I have the pulse of the character we’re going to, ‘She’s going to start here, and she’s going to end here This is the main relationship. This is the world and some of its rules — as she sees it.’ So then I hopefully know, or have some ideas about, the basic engine parts of a story — the pieces that I need to have in act one to propel act two, and emotionally what I think it’s about.

So the next step is I open a new document and do what I call a barf draft. I just puke it all out. I don’t stop. I don’t worry if it’s right or wrong. I don’t worry if, ‘Oh, god, I just had a new character walk in.’ Great, if they just walked in. I just let it come out.

This raw draft is the clay that I’ve pulled up from the riverbed. Now, okay, given all of this, what actually is the story, because suddenly a new character showed up, and the story just completely pivoted over to this direction. That’s much better. Let’s do that story. That’s a completely different plot, but I had to go through the first raw draft to get to that plot.

I am mentoring a young writer through The Academy and I’m putting her through this process. She outlined an idea for a pilot in a show, and then she brain dumped the pilot script as fast as she could. I think she wrote it in like two weeks, and then we went back and asked a million questions. Then I had her outline it again. New document, without opening any other document, outline it again, because it’s a new thing. Dump it again. And it’s shifting really fast into a much more solid story idea.

I think that some people get mixed up because they think that when you get notes, you’re supposed to open the document you had and then address those notes, like a list, but that never works, because that’s just symptoms of a disease.

You have to go down to see what is the core disease — probably in that story engine in act one. Really work on that, and then to re-card it, re-outline it. That’s rewriting to me.”

— Meg LeFauve

From Go Into The Story interview, April 2020

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