I remember the day I found out my draft status. I was really floored and kind of staggered around in a daze. It just hadn't occurred to me that I could end up in Vietnam.
I spent two months on the first draft, working 8 hours a day, five days a week.
The benefit of this kind of outlining is that you discover a story's flaws before you invest a lot of time writing the first draft, and it's almost impossible to get stuck at a difficult chapter, because you've already done the work to push through those kinds of blocks.
Unfortunately, there's still a lot of beginning writers who think you can just write your first draft and hand it in.
I'm against the draft. I believe we should have a professional military; it might be smaller, but it would be more effective.
I want to warn anyone who sees the Peace Corps as an alternative to the draft that life may well be easier at Fort Dix or at apost in Germany than it will be with us.
The draft is white people sending black people to fight yellow people to protect the country they stole from red people.
Literature that keeps employing new linguistic and formal modes of expression to draft a panorama of society as a whole while at the same time exposing it, tearing the masks from its face - for me that would be deserving of an award.
I try not to think too much about an audience when I'm writing the first draft of a book - at that stage, the prospect of anyone reading what I've written would be enough to scare me into setting my laptop on fire.
I can't be bothered to learn Final Draft. I'm not a technical person. Like, when I sing, I just want to sing the melody and write the lyrics.
New Yorkers should know that no one in the Administration, at the Department of Defense, or at the Selective Service System is advocating the reinstatement of the mandatory draft in any form.
You have to constantly work on your script if it needs it. You don't accept, 'Oh, I did a draft and...' No, it's your responsibility to work on the script as much as possible and make it better and better.
There's nothing I hate more than someone who speaks in the draft room with absolute conviction, but they have nothing to back it up.
After I've sent my revised draft to my agent and editor, they suggest more improvement sand again, this revision phase can take anywhere from a few hours to a few months.
I write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to get the first draft. I can write more quickly than I can read.
We have an incredible national forest service, and we have an incredible child outreach program that the president has put together. I don't see anything wrong with national service for a minimum of two years. If we were to require that, we wouldn't need a draft.
When the draft lottery came out, and the Clippers said they were gonna draft me, I went to Google to find out more about the Clippers because I didn't know a lot. And I was like, 'Okay, team owned by Donald Sterling.' So then I typed in 'Donald Sterling' in Google, and the first thing that pops up is 'Donald Sterling racist.'
Some people like to purge out a draft and just let it go and then go back and fix it, but I'm a writer-rewriter. I can't move on until I feel like it's presentable.
I've been very fortunate with my three spec scripts - which is sort of my thematic trilogy of the American Frontier. With 'Sicario', 'Hell or High Water' and then 'Wind River' - which is the third - there were no rewrites. It was the first draft for all three.
We kept my middle schooler home from school for three days before we turned in our final draft because she was so mean and so brutal at editing out all the cheesy bits. She would roll her eyes and make fun of us, and it was what we needed.
In L.A., we have a saying - 'What do you do?' It's less of a question and more of a self-defense mechanism for wayward screenwriters looking to slip you a first draft, or the occasional actor looking to get in on the latest shoot. But I hate the question because of my own answer - I write about games.
I always write on unlined typing paper and write the first draft in longhand, using cheap Bic pens. I try to write about four pages a day, which usually yields a first draft in six months. I don't plot ahead of time, so I'm flying by the seat of my pants for the first draft.
True partisans draft legislation that gives themselves everything and their enemies nothing. They love bills that repulse and even disgust the other side. Today's politics have become an all-or-nothing, black-or-white, zero-sum game - it's not a contact sport but a blood sport.
I wrote a draft of 'Playboy' for Warner Brothers, and it was impossible to really be independent of Hugh Hefner. In the end, Hugh Hefner was unable to take the back seat required to be able to write something about him that I felt I could do.
The requests for blurbs seem to come in waves. I'm not sure what precipitates them. I think it must be excruciating for editors to draft those elaborate letters asking for a blurb, and I know it's torturous for us writers to ask directly. But publishers encourage us to. Rock and a hard place.
If you're having trouble finishing a book, it might be that you're trying to fix it as you go. Just finish the story, no matter how terrible you think that first draft is. Then let it cool off. In other words, don't look at it for a while. Then you can rewrite it.
Political systems are run by self-selecting politicians. We don't draft people; it's not jury duty.
I have to do draft after draft... It takes me a long time, but I love doing it, and I have to do it every day, or I feel slack.
Cleveland was the only visit I made. I had a good feeling they were going to draft me, but I was still shocked when they jumped up to the second round.
I wrote the first draft of 'Plan B' the summer after I turned 21.
The thing that was most harmful was that there was always something that was about to happen. So I found myself indulging in the writer's luxury of doing another draft, another idea. If this project isn't happening, then I'll shelve one script and start writing another. And in that way, the years go by, and there's very little money coming in.
I hate first drafts, and it never gets easier. People always wonder what kind of superhero power they'd like to have. I wanted the ability for someone to just open up my brain and take out the entire first draft and lay it down in front of me so I can just focus on the second, third and fourth drafts.
When I finish a first draft, I often look back at first chapters I wrote and laugh at them. They're like pictures of yourself in middle school. You're embarrassed to see them.
The main reason why I would even potentially go to the NFL Draft is for my family.
I had talked to a lot of people in Golden State's front offices before the draft. They said they liked me, but they had a lot of guards, so I didn't think that I would end up there.
Honestly I'm excited for whatever team wants to draft me, and I'm excited to make an impact right away.