The brilliant @zcregger on the most important rule of draft — The elf thing is class. Mine’s a cat. Eager, messy and...

This little trick has made my life and my writing so much easier. And here's what it is. It's called the L thing. You pretend that you hired a little elf. And he's like this big and he's stupid. He's just like a dumb little elf. And you pretend that you hired him to write your whole movie for you, okay? Now here's the thing. He's not gonna do a good job. He's an elf, he's an idiot, okay? But you don't care. You just want him to just get you a draft. Once you get a first draft, then you can go in and you can be smart and you can fix it up. So you pretend, this is what I actually do. I pretend I am a little elf. And my job is not to make it good at all. My job is to write the worst version of whatever scene comes next. Just elf it out, just bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. If it's embarrassing and the dialogue is terrible, I don't care. If it's got typos, I don't care. If it doesn't even really connect to the scene that came before and I know it's not really gonna connect to the scene that comes after, it doesn't matter. I'm only paying this elf $10 to write this draft. So I get what I pay for, right? But what happens is because I don't care because I'm like totally free to just like let my fingers go faster than my brain. What always happens is something I really love will come into it and I'll go really quick and I'll get to the end of my first draft and that draft would be embarrassing. I would never show it to anyone. But that's okay because I named the document elf draft…