In Focus | December 2005 | Fun With Dick and Jane and Judd Uncut: "THE POWER
of the ‘VOMIT PASS’

You told the WGA about writing what you call a “vomit pass” on your scripts. Could you explain this for the aspiring scenarists in our audience?
I read a book by Ann Lamott called “Bird by Bird,” and in the book she talks about the “Down-Up Theory” — “Get it down, then fix it up” — and how you shouldn’t judge yourself when you’re writing your first draft. That should be a moment for pure creativity, and being too hard on yourself prevents you from finishing.

So I’ve taken that advice. I call it a “vomit draft,” which means I try to write a first draft really fast and not judge myself — and then I look at it and see what the hell happened, then deal with it in a more critical way.

Other people I worked with when I was a show-runner on TV shows could literally sit in a room and obsess for hours and hours over whether or not to put a comma somewhere. And you could see how much pain they were in as they were writing, because they were judging the work as they were writing it — and that’s impossible. I guess it’s possible — some people do it — but those are the people that take a long time to write, or suffer through it.

Do they tend to burn out earlier?
I don’t know. I just think it makes you write less. I read a lot about writing and how the brain works, and it’s true that your brain is cut in half, and one half judges and one half is really creative — and you shouldn’t have ’em working together.

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