How long does it take you to write a script?
As much time as I have minus two days, basically. It varies.
There's never enough time. Sometimes, usually on the early episodes in the season, one has a little more time, just because the train hasn't started rolling that hard yet. It's hard to say because we're all doing so many different things at once, it's not like we go away and have an unbroken block of time to write.
I would say generally, roughly, that usually we'll meet en masse for about three or four days to break the story in a group, either in the office or, in the off-seasons, usually in David's kitchen. [We have] a big whiteboard and say, "What's this episode about, what are the major story beats we're going to have, what's the body count going to be roughly, how many holes are we going to dig ourselves into." The show in the round numbers.
The writer will then go off and take a couple of days to a week, not unbroken and come up with a beat sheet. Act one scene one is this, act one scene two is this, here's the ad break, here's the big scene in act four. Then we all look at that and mark it up in blood and red ink, and the writer takes another shot at it.
Once we get the beat sheet in roughly workable shape, [so that] pretty much the bones of the story are there, the writer goes off to do a draft, which can be anywhere from a couple of weeks to, when we're in dire straits, three days or less. I should say, three days and nights. Then there's the generally interminable re-write process, which happens all the way up and through the shooting. Sometimes the script will go through a couple of drafts and be filmed, and sometimes the script will go through a couple of drafts and many, many colours [i.e. different drafts] of rewrites.
I have written a first draft in as little as a long weekend. On average I would say that if you give me two weeks I'm a happy writer. Because then I can postpone it for a week and a half and then write it in three days.
