How To Use The Talking Draft Method For A Fast First Draft

The Talking Draft Method is the fastest way for playwrights or screenwriters to create scenes. A writer records audio of themselves improvising all the dialogue and action, the audio is transcribed, then the text is reformatted into a script. This is not new, it is actually one of old Hollywood’s best-kept secrets.

The story goes that in 1934, novelist William Faulkner’s Hollywood career was circling the drain. His friend, film director Howard Hawks came to the rescue. Hawks bought the rights to two of Faulkner’s short stories. Hawks borrowed a Marconi Machine from the BBC and brought this massive reel-to-reel tape recorder to an office at MGM. Then, Hawks and Faulkner sat down and wrote two screenplays in one weekend.

Howard Hawks came armed with the stories already annotated. He had underlined the most vital bits of narrative action in Faulkner’s prose and reordered sections to keep the stories to a tight Hollywood structure. Using this as his outline, Hawks began dictating these “action” sentences into the microphone to set up the scene…

As the voice recorder rolled, Faulkner then improvised new dialogue to flesh out the moment from his concise short stories. Faulkner spoke as all the characters in each scene. Soon, he was doing both — dictating the action lines and creating new dialogue…