260 | From Barf Draft to Next Draft: 5 Steps to Take Now

The Screenwriting Life with Meg LeFauve and Lorien McKenna

Meg LeFauve & Lorien McKenna

Tv & Film

4.8 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 14 August 2025

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Join TSL Workshops: https://tslworkshops.circle.so In this episode, Meg and Lorien dive into a messy, magical stage of screenwriting: the barf draft — your first unfiltered pass at a script. They share how to tackle chaos on the page, whether your draft is too long, too short, tonally inconsistent (hello, surprise aliens!), or just plain confusing. You’ll learn how to shift from “fixing” to discovering, reverse-outline what you actually wrote, and surface what excites you most. Along the way, they cover structure, character agency, stakes, and the emotional rollercoaster of writing — including why finishing (even a disaster) is worth celebrating. Whether it’s your first draft or fifteenth, this episode will help you find clarity, confidence, and momentum. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:36.2	Hey everyone. Welcome back to the screenwriting life.
0:38.8	I'm Meg Lofos.
0:39.9	And I'm Lorian McKenna.
0:41.6	Meg, what are we talking about today?
0:43.2	Today's a topic show.
0:44.3	We're going to be talking about I've got a barf draft.
0:46.9	Now what?
0:48.0	So we're going to kind of take you through.
0:50.9	You've quote unquote puked out your idea onto 120, 130, 150 pages, however long it is.
1:00.5	Or it could be 80, right?
1:02.4	We don't know.
1:03.1	It could be however long it is, but you've got all the way to the end, which if you haven't,
1:06.7	you don't actually have a puke draft, by the way.
1:09.1	You have something else.
1:10.3	So this is assuming you've gotten all the way to the end of your first messy, horrible, wonderful draft.
1:18.6	And now you're looking at it and thinking, okay, now what do I do with this horrible, lumpy thing that doesn't work, which is very normal.
1:27.6	So we're going to go through and we're incorporating in here some questions that you
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