It’s back. Live breakdowns of First 10 Pages submissions! For those of you unfamiliar with the First 10 Pages Challenge, you can go back to the original post here. You can also check out my breakdown of five entries from last week. The short of it is you’re trying to write 10 pages that are impossible to put down. In order to emphasize this, I will stop reading someone’s entry the second I get bored. If that’s the first line, that’s the first line.
Now there have been some commenters who question the point of this exercise. Don’t listen to them. This exercise is one of the most important you will ever learn when it comes to screenwriting. It is teaching you two invaluable lessons. The first is the importance of grabbing the reader right away. And the second is being able to write an un-put-downable scene on command.
I’m hoping today’s analysis helps you understand where a reader might lose interest and why. In case you were wondering, I’m picking these entries at random. I’m not reading through scripts and finding the best examples for my argument. If your pages show up today, use the feedback to go back in and improve them. Or write something better. Most writers never experience this – someone detailing, out loud, why they gave up on a screenplay. So take advantage of it and get better.
You have until Sunday, February 10th, 11:59pm to submit your First 10 Pages. If you’d like to do so, send them to carsonreeves3@gmail.com with the subject line “FIRST 10 PAGES.”
Let’s get started!
The very first thing I read here is a character introduction. However, there’s no character description. Without a description, I’m imagining the most generic version of a man possible. Here’s a description of the main character from yesterday’s Black List script: “Drudge has a twitchy demeanor and horrific posture. He talks with a weird sense of confidence despite a nasally voice and the occasional stutter.” Do you see how big of a difference that makes?
Next, the character’s big action in the first image of the movie is to rub away a smudge. Now I know what the writer is thinking in this moment. He’s using it to tell us something about this character. And that’s a good instinct to have. But it doesn’t matter if the action itself is boring. The second we then cut to a shot of the sun, I’m finished. This is the opposite of immediately capturing our interest. You have to hook us right away. You can’t start with a boring action and follow it up with a static establishing shot.
What is it with writers and the sun? A reposting of Brenklco’s best comment ever: “Pretty sure that a reader who’s had to read thousands of screenplays no longer gives a f&%k what the sun and moon are doing or how they’re doing it.” We also have no space between the slugline and the action lines. Since all screenwriting programs do this automatically, this tells me the writer doesn’t have a screenwriting program, and therefore isn’t as serious about the craft. But even if you’re just broke (which some writers are – I get it), you should still know that you can’t do this.
The good news is, something is happening. We’re moving through the woods. We’re obviously pursuing something. And that’s enough to get me to keep reading. I want to find out what these characters are after. Unfortunately, the second it’s revealed that they’re after a deer, I’m out. I’ve read hundreds of deer-hunting scenes, many of those with a father and a son (and the son usually lacks the courage to shoot). I was hoping for something more exciting and original.
Before I even get to the first line of action, I’m confused. The slugline says this is a “mine shaft” and a “tower.” Aren’t those two different things? One’s underground and one’s way above it? I was literally about to give up on the slugline. But I figured, mine’s are interesting. I don’t encounter them in screenplays that often, so I keep going. I like that Jim is about to do something dangerous. That’s the one thing keeping me reading here. The strange double-space between Jim’s final line of dialogue on the first page throws up a red flag. Dan talks about arrangements for their sister. I’m not sure what that means. What arrangements? Seems strange to bring up now either way. The daughter line with the cheese grater to the dick is a jarring contrast to everything that’s been said so far. It sounds more like a comedy script line. So that’s where I stop.
I’m glad this one came up because it’s a common mistake writers make. The writer here starts out with a scene that has the potential to be interesting. A human is being born artificially. But they don’t do anything with it. All that happens is this clone is born and they’re put into a chamber. That’s not interesting. Think about how Neo is woken up in The Matrix. He’s bald, he’s in this endless tower of clones, a machine comes up and detaches a mechanism from his head, he’s flushed down some tube. Something is HAPPENING in that scene. This is just a quick empty moment of a clone being born. There’s not enough going on to hook us. I’d rather the writer build an entire scene around this than simply showing us a brief non-contextualized moment, a moment that is, quite frankly, one we’ve seen before.
I want to make something clear about this page. It’s fine. It’s completely fine. There’s nothing wrong with it. But that’s not the exercise. The exercise is not to write something that’s fine. It’s to write something that a reader can’t put down. It would make your head spin to know how many scripts I read that start with terrorists doing something. So the second I see that this is another one, I’m already checking out. I can’t figure out if experiencing this through CNN footage is better or worse than experiencing it as it happens, but I don’t think think it matters because this is a garden variety terrorist attack to begin with. If you want to give us a terrorist attack, it has to be a type of attack we haven’t seen before. Or it has to be executed in a way we haven’t seen before. Or preferably both. Another issue here is that no character is introduced. So there’s no one to latch onto and care about. This might as well be CNN on my own television. So again, there’s nothing wrong with this page. But that’s not the goal. You’re trying to blow the reader away. Make it impossible for them to stop reading.
For those wondering, I’ve read about 30% of the entries so far. And to answer the obvious follow-up question: I haven’t made it through an entire 10 pages yet. Mainly because writers are making mistakes like the ones highlighted in today’s entries. Hopefully, this gives you some insight in to how to make your pages better. Get back in there and keep trying!
