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.

How is started

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, even donning the voices of the different characters in his mind’s eye.

Hawks kept Faulkner to his Hollywood outline, and the two worked their way through both stories. They wrapped the weekend with two scripts on the reels.

Legend has it that on Monday, a stenographer typed up all the audio tapes. Then those pages were reformatted by script assistants. Satisfied with the drafts, Hawks’ producers at the studio cut a check to Faulkner, thus keeping him afloat. From 1934 to 1954 Faulkner went on to work on around 50 films.

How it's going

Over the years, many writers in Hollywood have used some version of this trick to crank out a fast first draft. Billy Wilder and Iz Diamond used to tape-record their jokey banter around the office — some of which made its way into their witty masterpieces.

For decades, writers for stage and screen often used the Talking Draft Method to capture the rhythms of stylized speech when doing a dialogue pass. Harold Pinter and Arthur Miller did it for the stage. Rod Serling famously did it for TV in the 50s and 60s using his beloved Dictaphone machine.

When Aaron Sorkin started his habit of driving around town with an audio recorder as he barrelled through dialogue, the whole process was still manual, as it had been since the days of Howard Hawks.

But now we have great digital tools like speech-to-text AI with 95% accuracy, automatic grammar and spell-check, and even specialized screenwriting software dedicated to the Talking Draft.

How to avoid the "First Draft Trap"

Most first drafts don’t get finished.

What the Talking Draft Method does better than anything to get your first draft done fast - like the speed of sound fast. As Phoebe Waller-Bridge says: “You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.”

So if you believe that the first draft just needs to get done, and you trust yourself to fix it later, the Talking Draft Method saves you from one of the classic traps of a first draft – “editing as you go.” What the Talking Draft Method gives you is spaghetti on the wall that you can rewrite, rewrite, rewrite.

The Talking Draft Method works wonders if you do like Howard Hawks did and begin with a tight outline. Good outlining can save anyone from another one of the common traps of a dead first draft - logic holes in your plot.

I recommend breaking down all your scenes into a scene-by-scene beat sheet with page targets because these page/minute reminders will help keep you from rambling when the mic is on.

Each scene description in your outline reminds you only of the vitals: what the scene needs to accomplish or what a character needs to discover in that specific location. These short reminders exist simply to cue your improv. Then, into a live mic, you talk your draft.

Don’t edit as you go. And if you’re transcribing, don’t look at the output. Any misspelling will only make you want to stop and press backspace. Don’t look back. Don’t edit as you go. Only forward!

Move at the pace of the scenes as they play in your mind’s eye. Don’t bother with transitions, parentheticals, or location slugs. And you surely don’t want to utter clunky voice commands like “tab, tab” “character name” or anything else that bucks you out of your creative flow state or knocks you off your story’s pace.

When it’s done right, a Talking Draft can be completed in nearly the same amount of time as the runtime. With a moderate amount of outline planning, the Talking Draft Method can carry you from your beat sheet to your first draft in one sitting.

The last hurdle to a painless Talking Draft is the issue of noting “who-says-what-when” in your dialogue. Going through a big block of transcribed text and manually breaking it up can be a pain. Solutions have ranged from stenography hardware to manual diarisation software such as that used in machine learning, to a lap stopwatch matched to a spreadsheet where each character was noted simply by a number (and zero as an action line).

It’s entirely possible to find a solution that works for you. With a bit of new technology, one of classic Hollywood’s best-kept secrets can become your own secret weapon.

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