I’m faced with a challenge. A professional resource whose opinion I’ve come to trust advises that I need to cut another 7,000 to 9,000 words from my manuscript to avoid an automatic “too many words” deletion at the hands of prospective agents looking to work through a large digital mount of submissions. After cutting almost 13,000 words already, all without losing what I might consider “the good stuff,” the effort has become a bit more challenging.
Earlier today, I listened to a fascinating interview with Phil Alden Robinson on Slate.com’s Working podcast. Robinson is the director and co-writer of, among other things, Sneakers, of my top 10 favorite films of all times. As it turns out, he and the other two screenwriters spent nine years working on the script. Nine freaking years! Of course, he created other things in the meantime – writing the script for All of Me (1984) and directing Field of Dreams (1989) – but he, Lawrence Lasker, and Walter F. Parkes stuck with it, refining, rewriting, and eventually crafting a fantastic heist film with an exciting, prescient story with great characters.
But how did they get there? One step was carrying out an exercise they called “Sneakers Greatest Hits” and “Sneakers Light.”
In “Sneakers Greatest Hits,” they wrote a script that included every one of the scenes, plot twists, and bits of dialogue they’d fallen in love with over the years of brainstorming. The draft was almost 200 pages long but full of fantastic stuff and rekindled their excitement about certain thing. For contrast, a typical screenplay for a feature-length movie is roughly 115 pages long. It was, of course, totally unproduceable at that length but this, let’s call it “the screenwriters’ cut,” represented a wish list of things they’d love to see on screen and in the story.
Then, they shifted to “Sneakers Light.” This time, they wrote a screenplay that stripped the script of everything that wasn’t absolutely vital to get the story from the start to the finish. That version came in at 93 pages and “moved like a bat of hell” and showed them that they didn’t need all of the other material to tell the story. But it also helped crystalize what they really did need to keep in, or as Robinson said, “it showed us that yeah, we don’t have to have A, B, C, D, and E but boy we’d really like to put F, G, and H back in there. And that was key to us winnowing it down and getting it to that final draft.”
I love that story, the idea of cutting it down to the bare bones before gradually building it back up again with only those elements that make a tight, dynamic story. I’m not sure I’m ready to strip the manuscript down that much but it is an interesting perspective as I look to get my book into fighting trim.