Yesterday, I proclaimed that I expected Bite After Bite to rule the weekend and win the Blood & Ink First Scene Showdown. And now I’m going to explain why. The Bite After Bite pages were the only pages out of the 62 submissions where I felt that the writer had captured the exact promise of their pitch. These pages are giving me the movie that I imagined.

If you missed yesterday, I’m doing a deep dive into the first scenes of the Blood & Ink Contest. Yesterday was winner, Karoshi: The Drive. Today, we’re getting our zombie on with Bite After Bite.

Let’s take a look.

You’ll notice that this page starts quite differently from yesterday’s first page. We don’t start in the middle of an action that’s already taking place. This scene is more of a slow build.

I point this out so that writers understand that there’s no universal “correct” way to start a script. You can start fast. You can start slow. Up to you. I will say that the slower you start, the better the writer you have to be. Because it takes a more skilled writer to keep the reader invested while things are moving along slowly.

I consider the opening page a great example of my newsletter article about pages 0 and -1. Bite After Bite is a first scene that is helped tremendously by what the logline promises. Here’s that initial logline: “From Bite to Bite, we follow the zombie infection as it spreads – each victim’s story unfolding from the moment they’re bitten to when they pass it on.”

That logline helps the reader power through a page where seemingly nothing is happening. And some of you might be saying, “Carson, do you really need extra fuel to get the reader through the very first page?” I’ll answer that question this way. Have you ever stopped reading on the first page? My guess is that you have. Well, Hollywood people have less patience than you. So, there’s your answer.

It turns out we didn’t have to wait that long for something to happen. This is, essentially, the inciting incident of the screenplay. Elliot has been bitten. Presumably, he’s now infected. This is going to propel the narrative for the rest of the screenplay.

So, even though the script starts “slow,” we’re still introducing a major plot point just two pages into the script.

Something I also noticed here was that Andrew is using even shorter paragraphs than Mike was yesterday. Most of the paragraphs are one line. And, if they’re two, they’re finishing very quickly on the second line. This moves the eyes down the page even faster than yesterday.

I strongly recommend doing this if there’s a lot of description in your story. Description can feel like a chore once those paragraphs get up to 4 lines or more. However, if you have a ton of dialogue, which is the fastest part of the script to read, then it’s okay to have longer paragraphs, as the reader is okay with reading them every once in a while.

To be honest, this page is a teensy bit clunky. The interaction between the family feels off. Amber seems to be working against her husband rather than with him.

I also think more clarity surrounding the bite could’ve been conveyed. I always go back to this directive: “If this conversation were happening in real life, how would it go down?” That’s not to say you have to use that conversation in your script. But it should be the foundation of the conversation you use because it is the most truthful. And, in writing, we writers can sometimes lose the thread and focus more on what we want to put in the script rather than what would actually happen.

Here, I feel like there’d be more discussion regarding what happened. “Wait, did you see anything?” “No, I was swimming and then I felt it and I shrugged it off.” The kid would probably ask, “Was it a shark?” “No.” The wife might say, “Hold on, take me through what happened.” I then think there would be a longer conversation about whether to go to the hospital or not. Instead, we’re taking pictures of the thing and moving on.

This is a good example of the difference between being a wordsmith and being a good storyteller. The most important thing you must do as a writer is get the reader to turn the page. To do this, you must be a good storyteller.  There are lots of ways to be a good storyteller and the use of suspense is one of the big ones. If you can learn how to build suspense, you can consistently hook a reader.  And if you can do that, you don’t need to be a wordsmith.

Even though there’s not a lot going on this page, there’s one line in particular that stands out. “My leg is on fire.” It establishes a ticking time bomb that we know, because of page -1, is going to kill him. And it’s going to be responsible for killing millions of others as well.

That one sentence compels us to keep reading. Because even though we know that he turns into a zombie, we can still hope we’re wrong. We can still hope (even if it’s impossible) that he figures it out before it’s too late. We’re also wondering if he’s going to turn and infect his family or if he’s going to be separated from them before things get bad. So there are still questions to be had.

We now have escalation. We talked about this yesterday. You want your scenes to evolve. You don’t want them to stagnate. One page ago, his leg was burning. Now he’s vomiting. Things are escalating which means we have to act fast.

Just two pages ago, we were watching a family enjoy their day at the beach. Now, things have gotten very bad very quickly. Real danger is rushing in. At this point, I would say it’s impossible to stop reading until the scene is over. Which is where you want to be with that first scene. You want to make it so that they HAVE TO finish the scene. Not even WANT TO. They HAVE TO.

The scene continues to evolve with a new character – the lifeguard. Things are getting bigger. Which is what you want. You want to BUILD with a scene. You don’t want it to stay the same. Writing a screenplay is about building pressure then releasing it. You can build within a scene. You can build within a sequence of scenes. You don’t want to go too long in your screenplay where you’re not building towards something.

I noticed some readers complain that we don’t care about this family because we don’t know anything about them.

That’s a choice we all have to make as writers. Do you want to go the traditional route, where you use your first 15 pages to introduce your hero (or heroes) in their everyday environment so that we get to know them and sympathize with them, and only THEN hit them with the inciting incident?

Or do you jump into the story right away and teach the reader about your characters while all the action is happening? With Bite After Bite, we’re going to be following 8 different stories which is why I’m guessing we don’t have time to set this family up. By the time this sequence is over, we’ll be moving on to another character. So, in this case, Andrew has no other choice but to do it this way.

And even if he didn’t, I still think jumping into things is a perfectly viable option. I will say, however, that you should look for quick ways to set up characters to create the “mini” effect of a larger character setup.

For example, maybe when Elliot is about to swim out, he sees a little girl who’s by herself in water that’s almost up to her chest.  She’s perilously close to losing her footing and being swept out.  He moves her out of the water, spots a family down the way, and says, “Hey! Is this your daughter!?” And they look over. The mother realizes, ‘Oh,’ and comes and grabs the girl. In other words, it’s a quick way to make us like Elliot a bit more. So you should be doing that in these scenarios to help make up for the fact that you weren’t able to set the characters up traditionally.

And by the way, I should point out, the writers who get paid the big bucks are the ones who can do what other writers can do in 1/4 the time, or 1/8 the time. They can make you like a character in one page as opposed to eight pages. So, you should definitely know how to set up a family like this quickly if you want to work in this industry.

I will say that there could be more specificity in this scene. I don’t know much about this beach other than it’s your garden variety generic beach. As someone who used to ride his bike down the beach from Santa Monica to Torrance, I can tell you that each beach has its own personality.

Santa Monica is all tourists. Venice is the pothead beach. Dockweiler has the planes taking off from LAX. Manhattan Beach was the glitzy beach. Hermosa Beach was beach volleyball central. Redondo has the giant pier that’s still stuck in the year 1993. Each beach had its own demographic.

It adds something extra when you bring those details into your story. Not just for the beach. But for the characters. For the community. For the types of people who are around. That’s how you make things feel real on the page.

The good news is, this is not something you have to worry about in the first draft. So I’m fine giving Andrew some leeway here. For your first draft, it’s okay to be a bit generic cause you got to get the pages down. That’s what’s most important. But once you get to draft two, you have to start populating these scenes with more detail.

I’m not entirely on board with “I’m going to do bad things.” That sounds like something Bruce Banner would say. I think it’s a lot scarier for everyone if he doesn’t know what’s coming.

Then again, these are STORY CHOICES. When I give notes, I’m usually using dramaturgy to inform the writer about what he should or shouldn’t do in his story. But sometimes, I’ll give an opinion.

When it comes to opinion notes, that’s up to the writer. I can convey my concern but if he doesn’t like my suggestion, he’s the writer. He’s the one who, ultimately, has to face the fire. Which is why, as a writer, you should go with choices that you believe in.

George Lucas famously got flak for “The Force” and Obi-Wan becoming a ghost in Star Wars. His director friends (DePalma especially) told him it was a dumb idea. But Lucas believed in the choice, kept it, and created one of the most iconic mythologies ever. So I won’t get mad at Andrew if he believes in this choice.

Yesterday I said to think of your first scene as a pilot episode. At the end of every pilot episode, you want to include a cliffhanger so that the reader wants to see episode 2. Likewise, at the end of your opening scene, create a cliffhanger that makes the reader want to read scene number 2.

The reason you want to do it this way is because of the way a reader thinks. A reader will start reading that first page. If there’s enough there that they like, they’ll mentally say, “I’ll read the rest of the scene.” But, if they don’t like that scene, they’ll stop reading. Which is why you use this little cliffhanger trick to FORCE them to read the second scene. Once someone starts reading a scene, they’ll usually finish it. So keep giving them reasons to start the next scene.

I know you guys are dying to know my prediction for how I thought this weekend’s voting would play out. I boldly proclaimed that one of the scenes was a clear winner. Did that scene win? I’ll tell you right now.

Here’s how I suspected the voting would turn out. I thought Bite to Bite would run away with the weekend. I thought Karoshi would be number 2. I thought Devil in 5D would be number 3. So, I was right in that sense that those did turn out to be the top 3.

I think people slept on Cleave. There was some good writing on display there. But I knew that a therapy scene was a tough sell. The reason I knew The Zakim wouldn’t win was because it was the exact opening scene you would expect. It was well-written but when you give the reader something they could’ve written themselves, they don’t see it as special. And then Immolation had that one great image but didn’t offer enough in the scene beyond that.

I might review a few of these scenes this week, depending on how today goes. If you like getting into the nitty-gritty of scene-writing, let me know in the comments, and I’ll review one or two more. Maybe I’ll even review Eldave’s scene, which I know some of you preferred over the scenes offered.

If there’s one thing we learned, it’s that writing first scenes is hard.  I’d say that of the 62 writers that entered, 50 of them didn’t have nearly a big enough dramatic engine to push their scenes along.  I can help you if you want to get better there.  As I stated in the newsletter, I’m doing one page of notes on First Scenes for just $75.  2 pages of notes for $125.  E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com if you want help.

Okay, let’s take a look at Karoshi: The Drive, which pulled in 18 votes for the win. What I’m going to do here is post half a page at a time then give my thoughts as we read.

The thing to take note of here is that the script starts in motion. There’s movement. Something is happening. And there’s an urgency to the proceedings, even if it’s just driven by the weather.

A lot of writers start their scripts off too casually and, in the process, lose the reader before they ever got them.

A smaller thing to point out is the sound. Movies have sound (newsflash, I know) and you want to mimic that where you can. Michael didn’t have to focus on the click-clack of footsteps but he did because that’s the sort of thing that brings you into the movie theater and it makes it feel like you’re watching a movie.

Here, we get our first glimpse into something being wrong. And we’re only halfway through the first page!  That’s good.

Remember, there’s this game you’re playing when you write a screenplay. Which is: How do I keep this person, who doesn’t want to read my screenplay, interested? And the answer is, you gotta move fast.

You don’t have to do something crazy. But you have to include little moments like this that require the reader to keep reading to find out more. By posing a simple, small mystery, “why are the driver’s eyes so sunken, sallow, and blood shot?” you create just enough suspense to make the reader have to read more.

The good news is, you don’t have to do this for every single page for the rest of the script. Hooking a reader is similar to hooking someone you’re talking to for the first time. If you get past those first couple of minutes and they like you, they’ll spend another half an hour chatting with you. That’s why this first scene is so important.

Things then escalate quickly. We go from ‘this guy is having a rough day’ to ‘this guy seems very off.’ But our hero is late to wherever she’s going so she doesn’t have the luxury of jumping out and grabbing another cab.

What’s happening now is escalation. Things are not staying the same. The same is boring. We’ve gone from sunken bloodshot eyes to “the DRIVER’s face, so, so, so, so tired, wan, pale, sickly…”

This is accompanied by our now being in danger on two fronts. Whatever’s going on with this guy, it seems like he could be dangerous. And then you have this out of control car. We’re in legitimate peril.

What you want to be doing with your first scene in particular is to ask yourself, after every quarter page, “If a reader reads this, would they have to keep reading?” Notice how I used the words “have to” instead of “want to.” You want to write pages that make readers HAVE TO keep reading.

And here, we pretty much have to keep reading. We’re helpless inside of a speeding car with something creepy going on with the driver. Even if you didn’t like this scene, you’re probably going to keep reading it because you have to find out how it ends.

I want you to note the style of writing here. Two line and one line paragraphs all the way down. Which means our eyes are moving down the page quickly. Also, the writer is matching the pace of the story with the writing.

You shouldn’t be writing 3 line paragraphs when things are moving this fast.

Also, the writing is strong enough that we don’t notice it. I can’t emphasize this enough. I read so many amateur scripts where something as simple as sentence structure gets butchered. So now, I’m focusing on a bad sentence instead of being wrapped up in the story.

“The air becomes a deafening cacophony of BLASTING HORNS.”

“And SUSAN sees, in that horrific instant, the true state of the DRIVER — half-dead, bone-thin, clad in filthy clothes…”

These are great, clear, descriptive sentences.

We never have any questions about what we’re seeing and what we’re experiencing.

For example, a lesser writer may have written that last line as, “The driver in the mirror now looks even worse than before.”

But how does he look? That weaker version of the line doesn’t tell us much. The image we’re getting is vague. That’s the difference between good and bad writing.

I saw some of you discussing the choice to CAPITALIZE certain words in your scene, and not knowing exactly when to do so.

The capitalization effect is one of the only screenwriting tools you can use to, sort of, mimic the intensity of watching something on screen, which is why it’s often used for sound effects. But there is no defined rulebook for how or when to use it anymore.

I suggest using it to emphasize intense beats within a scene. I like Michael using it for moments like “SWERVE,” and especially “CLIPPED.” You’re drawing attention to the moments that are going to pop onscreen.

The one beat I think Michael missed – and it was a big one – was “CRACKS.” When Susan’s head hits the window. You know that crack is going to bring out that, half-look-away audience moment where they all wince. And you can somewhat mimic that on the page by emphasizing the sound of the “CRACK.”

If I had one critique for this scene, it would be that I don’t like how passive our heroine is. On the one hand, I like that Michael’s playing into the terror and helplessness of being a passenger in a car we have no control over. It taps into that nightmare we’ve all had before.

But also, protagonists should never be passive. Good heroes always insert themselves into the problem to try and fix it. In other words, they are ACTIVE. Susan only does that here at the very end when she has to. I would’ve liked to have seen her try and stop this earlier. Try to be more involved.

You might say, “Do we really have time for that?” Of course you do. You could’ve easily added one more page in the middle of this car sequence. When you have an exciting situation like you do here, you don’t have to worry about condensing it. There’s enough drama and suspense to lengthen a scene like this.

And it isn’t just about making the hero active. As it turns out, Susan isn’t the script’s protagonist. But it creates more drama and uncertainty when you tease the possibility of fixing the problem, only to then see the protagonist fail, the situation get worse, and THEN (after all that drama) end up in a crash.

That creates more of that “roller coaster” emotional effect for the reader, which is always more satisfying and memorable.

The first four paragraphs here are REALLY GOOD WRITING. They give us total clarity over a very intense violent moment. The detail. The specificity. The sentence structure. All of it is very strong and a big reason why this scene won the showdown. The writing was a step above everyone else.

By the way, when I say “writing,” I’m referring to the actual writing – the words, the sentences, the description. That’s different from when I’m complimenting the storytelling, which is also good here, but I want to make sure you know that there’s a difference between the two.

Cause I know some really good writers who aren’t that great with telling stories, and vice versa.

Finally, we have the ending of the scene. Another reason I think this won was because it was an ending we were not anticipating. We weren’t anticipating that Susan would die. So it’s a shock. Any little thing you can do to throw the reader off of their expectations is good because the vast majority of writers write scenes that go exactly how you expect them to go.

Not only that but the visceral violence involved in the way that Michael killed off Susan made it THAT MUCH MORE impactful, leaving you in a state of shock. You’re not even sure what to do now. But one thing is definitely true, you’re going to read the next scene. Which is exactly what a first scene should accomplish.

I want to emphasize that. Instead of thinking of your first scene as 1 of 50. Think of it as a pilot script. A pilot script has to have a great cliffhanger at the end so that you want to see episode 2. Do the same thing here. Give them an ending that makes them have to read “the next episode,” aka, the next scene.

You’ve got about an hour left to vote for the best scene in the First Scene Showdown. It’s a close race so every vote counts!  For those of you who already voted, though, it’s time to get your Scriptshadow Newsletter on. This is a goodie! I teach you about two secret unknown pages in your screenplay along with their super powers. I’ve got a brand new interview for you from a Scriptshadow reader who got his passion project turned into a TV show. I’ve got a great book recommendation. I’ve got a script notes deal! And of course I give you my hot takes on all the latest trailers, each peppered with plenty of screenwriting tips.

Make sure to check your spam and promotions folders if you don’t see it.

If you don’t receive the newsletter within 2 hours of 9pm Pacific Time, or you want to be on the list, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line “NEWSLETTER.”

What I liked most about this showdown was that every time I opened an e-mail submission, I would read the logline and think, “Ooh, this sounds good!” You can’t even begin to understand how amazing that feeling is when you compare it to what I usually go through, which is that I have to repeatedly read ten submissions to find a single decent logline.

With that said, if I’m being 1 million percent honest, there were no standout first scenes here. Which isn’t the end of the world. It’s hard to write a great first scene. Heck, it’s hard to write a great anything.

One of you posted a published top 10 list of the best agreed-upon opening horror scenes of all time and even that list starts to get weak towards the bottom. The 11 thru 20 best that you also posted made me realize just how rare it is to find a strong first scene.

But I think there’s a clear best scene in this bunch. Curious to see if you guys vote it to the top. I will reveal which one I thought was the clear winner at the end of the weekend. You can vote until Sunday, 10pm Pacific Time.

If you’ve never voted in a showdown before, it’s easy. Read as much of each scene as you can then use the comment section to cast your vote for your favorite scene. I’ll review the winner after the weekend.

And since I know this question will be asked, there were 62 writers who submitted their first scene for the showdown.

Good luck everybody and have an awesome screenwriting weekend.  It goes without saying: Write your asses off!

TITLE: Karoshi: The Drive
Genre: Horror
Logline: A reporter investigates the stories of people who are literally working themselves to death, then realizes she can’t eat or sleep or rest either, she must keep working on the story, hoping to undo the curse before it kills her too…
Full Scene: LINK HERE

Title: CLEAVE
Genre: Horror
Logline: At a couples retreat for failing marriages, a husband and wife face an extreme form of therapy that requires purification through pain. As the therapy grows increasingly brutal, it becomes clear that their hosts have no intention of letting them leave alive.
Full Scene: LINK HERE

Title: The Devil in 5D
Genre: Horror
Logline: A woman begins to suspect the man living in the floor above her is actually Satan, and the building itself a portal to hell.
Full Scene: LINK HERE

Title: Immolation
Genre: Horror
Logline: Haunted by her husband’s fiery suicide, a young widow infiltrates a trauma-support cult connected to his death only to find herself seduced by its charismatic leader, who promises spiritual liberation through self-immolation.
Full Scene: LINK HERE

Title: Bite to Bite
Genre: Horror
Logline: From bite to bite, we follow the zombie infection as it spreads – each victim’s story unfolding from the moment they’re bitten to when they pass it on.
Full Scene: LINK HERE

Title: The Zakim
Genre: Horror – Monster in a Box
Logline: A group of motorists become trapped when a monster intended to be the ultimate killing machine gets loose on Boston’s Zakim Bridge and the military won’t let anyone off until the beast feeds.
Full Scene: LINK HERE

Today’s script feels like the movie Tarantino was writing as his final film before abandoning it. That script was called “The Critic,” about a movie critic. I can imagine today’s antagonist being exactly who Tarantino envisioned for his own critic.

Genre: Dark Comedy/Thriller
Logline: A long-suffering sous chef seeks revenge after a chauvinistic food critic’s zero-star review destroys her debut restaurant – and everything is on the menu.
About: Today’s review has more storylines than the Bible. The script comes from amateur screenwriter Michael Wightman. It was originally entered in the Mega Showdown. It did not make the finals. So I recently put it up with four more scripts in the Second Wave Showdown, which gave a chance to screenplays that didn’t make the Mega Showdown cut. What I didn’t know until today is that Michael Wightman is the same writer who wrote “The Best and the Brightest,” another script that didn’t make the finals of a contest but would win some readers over and eventually go on to get sent all over Hollywood. Here’s that logline if you forgot it: “After the president of the United States is poisoned aboard Air Force One, a no-nonsense Secret Service agent reluctantly teams up with a hotshot White House staffer to investigate a flight of high-maintenance VIP suspects and solve the murder before the plane lands.” So now Michael is back writing the opposite of high concept. Let’s find out what that looks like.
Writer: Michael Wightman
Details: 107 pages

In a perfect world, I would only review screenplays from the writers of this site. The reason I don’t do that is because I need at least SOME positive reviews. And whenever I read an amateur script for the site, 95% of the time, it isn’t worth the read.

So, if you want more homegrown scripts reviewed, you gotta bring the heat. You have to be able to play with the big boys, write on par with the professionals. I liked today’s idea. I tend to always like dark scripts about chefs, mainly because that job is one of the most pressure-intensive in the world. We all saw what that looked like in the first two seasons of The Bear.

I’m hoping that this latest amateur script is good because it will allow me to review more amateur scripts on the site.

Chef Kat Winnick is at the culmination of years of hard work. She’s opened her own restaurant. And the first night is going well until 55-year-old New York Times food critic Jonathan Croxton shows up in disguise. He’ll be grading the food on the restaurant’s very first night.

It does not go well. Jonathan’s voice-over of his review plays over shots of the first night’s struggle. And as the review continues, we realize he’s eviscerating the place. After the scene ends, we cut to months later and the restaurant went out of business due to that review. Kat is devastated.

Kat must grovel to get a sous chef job at another restaurant and, by coincidence, Jonathan shows up there too. He doesn’t like the way Kat cooked his steak and so he gets her fired from that job as well. This dude is relentless!

But Jonathan’s life isn’t going perfectly either. The New York Times tells him that he’s close to being a fossil in this business, which doesn’t appreciate written reviews anymore. All food reviewing is online now, a place that Jonathan despises. They tell him he needs to step down.

Jonathan drifts through a series of encounters with the world – a book tour, a mentorship, and eventually partnering with a wealthy backer to open a restaurant.

He’s later poisoned by raw carrots at a random restaurant and presumes it was Kat. He gets the sense that he’s being watched wherever he goes in the city. He comes home to his apartment one night to find his precious bird has been let out of its cage with the apartment window open. And he even comes home another night to find that dinner has been made for him (his favorite, foie gras).

When Jonathan is finally invited to dinner by an elusive ‘pop-up’ chef he’s been desperate to try, he goes there expecting to experience the best culinary night of his life. And he experiences exactly that. Unfortunately, he experiences so much more.

Starcrossed is a strange script. But it’s strange in so many good ways!

There are a lot of unique choices here that help this script stand out. And I want to go over some of the more prominent ones because if there’s one big lesson to learn from today’s script, it’s to make creative choices that don’t always line up with what you’re “supposed to” do. The reason this is important is because the choices that are “wrong” are also the choices that make your script different from others. There’s still the challenge of getting those “wrong” choices to work. But, if you’re a good writer, and today’s writer is, you can make it work.

The first bold choice was to primarily follow Jonathan, the villain of the story, as opposed to Kat, our “good guy.” 99 out of 100 writers would’ve followed Kat. So, just by doing the opposite, the script already has a different feel to it.

The problem that I’ve discovered in the past when writers do this is that we so dislike the villain that we don’t enjoy being around them. But Michael has crafted a really interesting character in Jonathan. He is this pompous a-hole who believes he walks on water and yet he’s also being phased out of the business. So he’s having to face his career mortality head-on.

For many people, especially men, they tie their identity to their profession, especially if they’re successful. So, being told to step down from that profession forces the character to evaluate who they are (if they aren’t their job). And I loved that contrast here. Jonathan is an arrogant self-important prick who believes he’s god’s gift to food criticism who’s terrified that, in a year, he’ll be jobless.

What that contrast does is it creates a level of unpredictability when Jonathan interacts with others. In one scene he’s gleefully tearing down some new restaurant’s signature dish. And in the very next scene he’s watching from afar as the cool new kids at the paper talk about the hot new mysterious pop-up chef they’ve all experienced, a chef that Jonathan can’t seem to get an invitation to no matter how hard he tries.

I love that. I love when a character is unpredictable. It keeps me on edge. The most boring characters are the ones who you know exactly what they’re going to say every scene before they say it.

Another choice Michael made – this one plot-related – was something nobody else would’ve done because screenwriting books tell you not to. Yet it was incredibly effective. He gave us the big scene in the beginning where Jonathan’s review destroys Kat’s restaurant on its very first day.

But then, months later, Kat has to swallow her pride and become a sous chef at another restaurant. And it just so happens that Jonathan comes there for a meal. Kat cooks him a steak. He gets mad at the way the steak is cooked, complains to the restaurant owner and gets her fired.

Wow.

Imagine ruining someone’s career and then additionally ruining their sad Plan B career as well. Normally, screenwriting teachers would say this second ruining was unnecessary. The first one did the job. You’re just repeating a plot beat, which you’re never supposed to do. But this scene was a pivotal one in pulling me into the story. It turned Jonathan from an annoyance to a verified a-hole. An a-hole that I now wanted to see go down.

Once you can pull a reader in emotionally, such as the case here with me wanting to see Jonathan taken down, you’ve got them. That’s one of the most effective ways to connect with a reader.

Finally, I loved the Máximo mystery chef. Because Michael has a tough job for himself here. There isn’t a big narrative engine driving the story forward. Jonathan doesn’t technically have a goal. We’re essentially waiting for the next big strike by Kat. That’s a story engine in a way, but it’s not usually one that can drive an entire movie. You need more.

Michael recognized this and looked for other ways to complement the story engine. Máximo was the perfect way to do this. He’s this culinary mystery man who carefully curates his guest lists and his moving restaurant never pops up in the same place twice. Jonathan becomes obsessed with making the list. And that becomes a sort of minor story engine.

By story engine I just mean anything that creates page-turning momentum. If the reader wants to keep turning the pages to find out what happens, he’s doing so because the writer has created either one powerful, or a series of medium to small, story engines. So, I thought that was really clever on Michael’s end to recognize that issue and plug something in there to make sure we remained invested.

So, if this script is so good, you’re probably wondering why it didn’t do better in the contest. It didn’t even make the main Mega-Showdown. It only made the more recent Second Wave Showdown.

I know the answer to this.

The first scene was not good.

Michael makes a classic mistake which was to use that first scene (where Jonathan’s review of Kat’s restaurant plays over her opening night) as information.

Don’t get me wrong. The scene does a good job setting everything up. But that’s only half of what you’re supposed to do with your opening scene. The other half – and arguably the more important half – is that you have to entertain us.

If I’m your average reader, I am not entertained by this opening scene. I’m more trying to keep up. Trying to keep tabs on who’s who. I’m trying to figure out what this voice-over is about, which wasn’t clear at first. It feels like work. And that’s just a script killer right there. If your opening scene feels EVEN A TEENSY BIT like work to the reader, they’re probably not going to continue reading. And that’s what I suspect happened with the site members who gave this a shot.

Because for those first ten to fifteen pages, I was already thinking about the negative things I was going to talk about in the review. And then everything started to come together and the script got significantly better as it went on.

This is apropos since we have the big First Scene Showdown for the Blood & Ink participants coming up. So those writers need to keep in mind that you don’t get points for your well-written setup. Setup should be a given. It’s the entertainment part that matters most.

This script was excellent overall, though. It kept getting better. And it has a really fun ending.

Script link: Starcrossed

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: I don’t know what kind of process Michael went through where he came to the conclusion to follow Jonathan over Kat. But it was the right decision. And I think what aspiring writers need to take away from that choice is that you should always consider following the best character that you’ve written, even if doing so is nontraditional. Jonathan is simply a more interesting character than Kat. If we had followed Kat in her pursuit to take down Jonathan, this script isn’t nearly as interesting. So if a supporting character that you’ve written is unexpectedly awesome, at least ask the question to yourself, “What does this script look like if I make them the main character?”