Protection, and the Page

My wife mentioned the fact that I'm a script reader to a woman at her job, who shared the story of her own husband. Apparently he'd spent two years writing a screenplay, then through a computer glitch he lost it all.

Every last word.

Do I feel bad for him? No. To me this just sounds stupid.

Because I worry about losing one day's work -- much less two years' worth.

Previously, whenever I wrote on my computer, I'd save everything on a disk at the end of the day. Not even the same disk every day -- I'd have 4 or 5 that I'd rotate through, just in case one was bad (or 2, or 3).

Since I've gotten the laptop, where I do all my writing now, at the end of every writing day I e-mail a copy of the script to myself.

Anal? Over-cautious? Maybe. But it takes a minute or two, and saves what could be hours of work.

But the main reason I'd never lose two years worth of work?

Every few weeks, I print out whatever I'm working on.

I've found that reading a script on the page is entirely different from reading it off the screen. And that there is nothing to jumpstart your writing -- and really seeing how it is going -- than just printing out what you have, and spending a chunk of time just curled up with the pages.

The process of disappearing into the pages just feels different than disappearing into the screen. Scenes will look differently, and read differently. Things will jump out -- scenes that are playing too long, dialogue that is dragging on and on.

More importantly, I can take a pen, and I mark the hell out of it. Jot ideas for dialogue changes, which I may or may not actually use, when I revisit it later - so it's not something I'm just impulsively changing in the computer, and then forgetting about. Tighten scenes down, pick up on repetitive bits.

I'm getting better about judiciously doing the whole editing thing too, particularly once I feel that the storyline is finally there (a place I feel I've finally gotten to with my supernatural thriller) and that the real polishing can begin.

If nothing else, the flexibility of holding the whole draft in your hand, so you can flip back and forth between scenes and lay them side by side, rather than scrolling through a draft on the screen, is invaluable.

So I have endless drafts of works-in-progress crammed into boxes in my closet, because not only do I not want to lose anything, but because I think that actually getting words onto paper, even in this computer age, is important to getting your script to work.

Writing a script for two years, and never letting the script out of your computer? On one level, ouch. But on a more basic level, to me it's a sign that he just wasn't taking it all seriously enough.