First drafts are meant to be terrible. They are the vomit drafts. Thoughts are meant to splurge out into the world, with that single good idea emerging alongside all those hideous ones, like a cuddly Mogwai surrounded by Gremlins. Ernest Hemingway (possibly) summed it all up when he uttered:
“The first draft of anything is shit.”
To which I say: put your money where your mouth is, Ernest (or whoever you are). We need to see some examples. Show don’t tell, fella. Otherwise, that pithy little saying is just a load of empty words.
Fortunately, it’s Ed Catmull to the rescue. Catmull — president of Pixar and Disney Animations — has a similar take on first drafts in his book Creativity, Inc.:
“Candor could not be more crucial to our creative process. Why? Because early on, all of our movies suck … I choose that phrasing because saying it in a softer way fails to convey how bad the first versions of our films really are.”
However, Catmull succeeds where Probably-Not-Ernest-Hemingway failed: he is bursting with examples.
Take Monsters, Inc. which — as we all know it — is about two friendly monsters, Sulley and Mike, getting a toddler back to her home. According to Catmull, this originally began life very differently, being about a thirty-something man who is followed by — and eventually befriends — his childhood monsters. Unsurprisingly, this didn’t work. And so the iterations began:
“At first, the human protagonist was a six-year-old named Mary. Then she was changed to a little boy. Then back to a six-year-old girl. The she was seven, named Boo, and bossy — even domineering. Finally, Boo was turned into a fearless, preverbal toddler. The idea of Sulley’s buddy character — the round, one-eyed Mike, voiced by Billy Crystal — wasn’t added until more than a year after the first treatment was written.”
These kind of examples are what make Creativity, Inc. so fascinating to read. It is a collection of origin stories for much-loved films. Knowing that, say, Woody was a whisker away from being a tyrant, lends weight to Catmull’s words.
As Catmull describes it, Pixar film plots don’t just quietly evolve. Instead, they take that one good seed of an idea — monsters are real! — and craft it until, inevitably, they have a runaway hit on their hands.
Sure, the first draft of anything is shit. The end result, however, can be enough to bring a tear to the eye of the most wooden of toy cowboys.