John Schimke knows a thing or two about doing the work. The AFI Directing alum has spent several years shaping emotionally resonant stories as the lead editor and producer of Emmy Award-winning Red Table Talk, and as the writer/director of Don't Tell Larry, which premiered at the 2023 Austin Film Festival and took home Best Picture and Audience Choice at the Pasadena International Film Festival.
When he sat down with Film Courage, the wide-ranging conversation kept circling back to one throughline. The path to good writing runs directly through a lot of bad writing first. The work is in the doing, not the finishing. Every draft teaches something you couldn't have gotten any other way.
Enjoy the whole interview below.
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The Bad Pages Are Part of the Process
This is one of the hardest things you face as a writer, but if you've written a script or two, the process is likely familiar to you. You write stuff that's bad. You just do. Maybe the plot is contrived, voices are flat, or the beats just aren't landing the way you want them to. You read it and think, "Ew, what have I done?" That's normal.
Schimke is asked directly how often he writes awful pages on purpose, and his answer is a lot, and for a long time.
His film Don't Tell Larry went through more than 20 drafts with co-writer Greg Porper. The first few got thrown out entirely.
The point wasn't the pages themselves as an exercise, but what they revealed. He and Porper discovered their lead characters and how their dynamic worked, only by writing through it.
"And we needed to write those drafts in order to figure that out, because we had no idea. We had no idea. And the only way to have an idea is just to take the plunge and write it."
A bad draft is research, not wasted time. Do the "vomit" pages. Get something out, because you can always build from there.
Your Early Ideas Are Allowed to Be Impossible
One of the original opening sequences for Don't Tell Larry had Susan riding a Bird scooter through city streets while holding a cake, paddling a canoe in Lake Superior to catch a departing cruise ship, and climbing up the side of the boat with the cake intact.
Schimke and Greg loved it. They laughed while writing it. They knew it was unshootable.
But the value was real. That sequence taught them who Susan was (tenacious, headstrong), and they carried those character discoveries into the final, producible version of the script.
"Don't give yourself too many limitations, per se. And then eventually you've got to come down and really, brass tacks, figure out, what is it that you're really going to be able to do?"
If you're getting notes back on characters feeling weak, here are 5 reasons readers don't care about your characters. You have to know who they are before an audience can.
Repetition Is the Work
Schimke makes a connection between his craft and something he watched growing up. His mother was an oil painter who would paint over canvases she didn't like until she found what she was after.
He applies the same logic to editing. He'll edit a 15-minute sequence, watch it in context, realize it's wrong, and recut from scratch. As in writing, the first cut wasn't wasted. It showed him what he needed to do next.
And sometimes it hurts to lose something you love, but it has to be done, and you'll be happier for it.
"Repetition is the mother of all skill. If you keep doing it over and over and over again, it will get better."
Know When a Page-One Rewrite Is Warranted
Something in the story is just not working. You've outlined, you've started, maybe you got around 20 pages, but something feels off. If you recognize this, great. You've always got time to recalibrate.
Schimke's instinct is to say you should start over from page one on a script "when you hate it," although he immediately walks that back.
King wrote three pages of Carrie, decided he hated it, and threw them in the trash. His wife Tabitha retrieved the manuscript, read it, and told him to keep going. "You've got something here." The book launched his career. King was wrong about his own pages.
Schimke's actual advice is about how a page-one rewrite makes sense when the script feels uninspiring, but only after checking whether you've drifted from the original idea that made you want to write it.
"You've got to hold on to what your first inspiration was that got you excited about writing the idea. If it's still orbiting what the catalyst was of why you wanted to write the story, then you shouldn't do a complete page-one rewrite."
If you find yourself getting repeatedly stuck or unable to pass that page-20 mark, I would say there's something that isn't clicking or isn't fully developed. It could be the plot itself, or your characters, or a theme you haven't nailed down yet.
Ask yourself, is the script uninspiring, or just not working yet? Different problems, different solutions.
Learn more about script rewrite strategies.
Caring About Your Characters Is the Whole Point
Schimke brings up Titanic. He saw it four times in theaters, and on his first viewing got so caught up in Jack and Rose that he forgot the ship sinks.
That's what storytelling is for.
"I care for these fake people. But that's what cinema is about. That's what it's about. You care about these people."
The reason those throwaway drafts of Don't Tell Larry mattered is that Schimke and Greg were trying to figure out who Susan and Patrick were, because you can't make an audience care about characters you don't fully understand yourself.
The bad pages earn their keep here. You're not just generating plot; you're learning whether you actually like these people
If you're struggling in this area, read more about how to develop stronger characters.
