I think revising is the same as writing, at least when it comes to the essential truths I wrote about in “Write Like a Motherfucker.” It’s all work. It’s all part of the process. Writing and revision are not two entirely different things, even though they demand slightly different things of us.

I finished it only to get on set and start re-writing everything.

Very often I do a first [draft] and I give it to friends. I ask them to read it, to give me their suggestions; what they think, what they understand, what works or not for them. I work again and again, and I don’t stop working until the shoot. And very often during the shoot, I change the script.

No, I’m never worried that I’m going to forget anything from a previous draft. It’s not that I don’t forget good things, but I think that often we fetishize what has been done to the detriment of the larger design. I think sometimes we fall in love with a paragraph, even a chapter or a character, and ultimately, those things don’t necessarily add to the book at hand. I actually see it as this beautiful process of almost whittling away. I know it seems counterintuitive, but if I do remember something and it does come into the book in the next draft and I never look at my previous draft, then it probably deserves to be there.