What if you could outsource your screenplay's first draft? Not only would you have a full script to edit from, but you would also save yourself the time, emotion, and heartache that come with creating it.
No, this is not about AI. Just get an elf to write that vomit draft.
That's what Zach Cregger, writer and director of Barbarian, Weapons, and the latest Resident Evil, does.
Cregger's "Elf It Out" Concept
In an interview with Room 243 Productions, Cregger provided a valuable lesson for any screenwriter who struggles to get that first draft completed.
"You pretend that you hired a little elf…and he's stupid. He's just like a dumb little elf, and you pretend that you hired him to write your whole movie for you," Cregger advised. "Now here's the thing: he's not going to do a good job. But you don't care. You just want him to get you a draft."
Here's how the "elf it out" concept works, according to Cregger: keep your fingers moving and story flowing. Whatever comes out, comes out.
The elf's job isn't to go back and edit or outline or fill in plot holes (and there will be Grand Canyon-sized plot holes). The idea is to give yourself permission to write. Even if it's complete garbage, or even if it's stupid.
"You want to create space for yourself to be careless, because being careless, that's the secret. If it's easy, you're doing it right." — Zach Cregger
Other Big Writers Do This Too
The stories of John Hughes are legendary. He used a speed draft, or vomit draft, method and wrote classic films like Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Sixteen Candles in a matter of days.
It wasn't unusual for him to be typing away in his home office for 20 hours at a time. All he knew was the beginning and end of the story he wanted to tell: embracing the chaos, refusing to censor himself, and seeing what he came up with for the middle.
But his movies didn't come out of this process completed. What followed were rewrites – many, many rewrites until it became the films we recognize today.
Another writer who writes like this is Sylvester Stallone, who famously wrote Rocky in 3 days. That was the first draft.
“I find the majority of people, myself included, you’re looking for procrastination, you’re looking for distraction, and it takes 10 months to write a screenplay, a year, sometimes they never finish,” Stallone said on Melrose Podcasts. “So, I tell people, I don’t care how bad it is – write 10 pages, they’re garbage. But they’re 10 pages you sat down and accomplished.”
Stallone said in a Medium interview that he realizes 80% of it might be crap. But it doesn't matter because it's all about the rewrite.
Cregger, Stallone and Hughes all know that you can fix bad writing, but you can't fix a blank page.
No Bad Ideas
What the elf writing process does is remove the internal critic that constantly tells you that your writing isn't good enough and stifles your creative thinking. Leave it to the elf to write that first draft and pure storytelling comes out.
If you're carefully considering every line of dialogue, every piece of action, and each character's motivation, you start to think a little too much. That constant pausing and thinking kills your momentum.
If you've ever been in a state where words seem to flow out like running water, that's because you're not overthinking. That flow state is what the elf gives you. And if the idea is bad, that's fine. It can become something incredible in later drafts.
Cregger on Writing Resident Evil
For a reboot like Resident Evil, you'd think outsourcing the writing job to an elf wouldn't work out. The stakes are too high for such a well-known piece of intellectual property, and this is a bigger studio movie than his previous Barbarian and Weapons.
That's not his style and it's not how he wrote it.
“This movie was written from a purely follow my nose kind of experience,” Cregger said in a Creative Screenwriting interview. “There are two different approaches to writing a movie. You know what’s going to happen, you outline it, you hit your targets and you plan it ahead of time. The other is, I think Stephen King described it as an archaeologist unearthing a dinosaur bone. You really don’t know what’s going to happen, or where it’s going to go, and this movie was very much that sort of a process. I had no idea what was going to happen as I was writing it. A lot of the twists and turns were just me trying to throw curveballs at myself.”
Hiring an elf won't work for everyone, but whether it's a scene or a whole screenplay, it's worth letting your fingers dance along the keyboard and seeing what comes out – it could even be the force that drives you through the dreaded writer's block.
Give it a try – you can always fire the elf.