Genre: Sci-Fi (TV 1-Hour Drama)
Logline: Within hours of learning from an otherworldly source that his upcoming flight is destined for disaster, a would-be Good Samaritan highjacks Northwest Orient flight 305 in order to prevent it from crashing – so begins the saga of history’s most elusive fugitive, D.B. Cooper.
Why You Should Read: To be entertained. You could simply read to page 2, at which point you’ll hopefully buckle up and enjoy the ride. For those familiar with D.B. Cooper, great. For those who aren’t, a quick review of his wiki page may interest you.
Writer: Scott A. Kovall
Details: 71 pages

Man, this was one of the closest Amateur Showdowns ever.

The three top scripts all had virtually the same vote count. That makes it tough for me because how do I choose?!

In the end, I decided to go with the TV pilot because TV is so important right now with everything that’s going on in the world. We’re all staying home looking for that perfect show to help us through the quarantine. It feels like the right time to review a pilot.

For those wondering which script I’d read and liked from the Sci-Fi Showdown offerings, it was “Nowhere Girl.” One of the most unique premises I’d ever come across and something that should’ve imploded within 20 pages. But Chris Cobb somehow pulls the bizarre execution off. The original draft I read probably would’ve garnered a double-worth-the-read.

So “On This Day In History” has a lot to live up to. I don’t want to feel like I made the wrong choice here so let’s hope Mr. Kovall pulls this off!

[A quick note. I’m going to summarize the plot but I might get some things wrong. I struggled to understand even basic plot points.]

A guy named Sinth who has a tattoo of the name “D.B. Cooper” on his exposed shoulder is sitting on the top floor of a skyscraper in New York in 1974 looking for people to shoot with his scope-rifle. It’s hard to understand if he’s got a specific target in mind or he’s just looking for bad folks.

Cut to three years earlier where Sinth is a high school history teacher. After his class, a strange 25 year old woman with a guitar named Leighton tells him that his on-again-off-again best friend, Tweet, needs his help tonight. Sinth responds to her by writing all his responses on the blackboard.

That evening Sinth takes a ride on his motorcycle only to run into a giant tornado. Luckily, his on-again-off-again buddy Tweet’s house is on his escape route. He runs inside and, by virtue of being there at just the right time, stops the tornado from killing Tweet.

It turns out Leighton is both from the future and invisible to everyone but Sinth. Her job is to tell Sinth to be at certain places at certain times to stop tragic things from happening. For example, she takes Sinth to a hockey game where he stops a puck that goes into the stands. Had he not been there, the puck would’ve hit a young girl in the head and killed her.

What Leighton really needs Sinth for, however, is to go on a certain flight and follow a set of instructions where he will appear to be demanding money. But, in reality, he’s taking the plane off its planned flight path where it would’ve collided with another plane and killed everyone on both flights.

After Sinth, aka D.B. Cooper, does this, he heads back to his high school teaching job where we spend the last ten pages of the pilot, Sinth talking to his class who only want to discuss the now famous story of a guy named D.B. Cooper who jumped off a plane with a bunch of money. The end.

I’m going to share with you some behind-the-curtain details on why I picked this pilot for Sci-Fi Showdown. D.B. Cooper is an infamous mythological figure. Placing him in a science fiction environment sounded fun.

However, if I’m being honest, I was concerned about the logline. It sounded unfocused. And in almost every case where I’ve read an unfocused logline, the script itself has been unfocused. When you think about it, it makes sense. If a writer can’t make one sentence clear, how can they make 70 pages clear?

Unfortunately, that fear was confirmed.

I was lost pretty much from the get-go.

We meet our hero, Sinth Freeman, four pages in, where we’re told he’s America’s Most Elusive Fugitive Ever. We then focus on a tattoo on his arm that says, “D.B. Cooper.”

So many questions.

Is his name Sinth Freeman or D.B. Cooper?

If he’s D.B. Cooper, why would he announce to the world he’s D.B. Cooper by tattooing “D.B. Cooper’s” name on his shoulder?

Or is this after his infamous escape from the plane, in which case maybe he’s using the name “Sinth” to hide his true identify? But wouldn’t showing your real name via tattoo defeat the purpose of that?

Or has he not become a fugitive yet? If so, why have two names?

I’m so confused already and we’re barely four pages in.

But it gets worse.

Why is this guy propping himself down in the middle of New York randomly searching for people to shoot with a rifle? Is he a good samaritan who just happens to be an expert rifleman on the lookout for criminals? Or is he a trained killer who’s been hired for a job?

Aggressively unclear.

But it get worse.

The Blackboard scene.

We cut to three years earlier where Sinth, a.k.a. not yet D.B. Cooper, is a teacher. A guitar playing woman named Leighton shows up in his class. Leighton starts asking Sinth questions and for reasons I have no answers for, Sinth only responds to her through writing answers down on the blackboard.

Is Sinth a mute back in 1971? Has he not learned to talk yet?

All unclear.

At this point I thought I was at least halfway through the pilot. I looked up and nearly had a heart attack. I was only on page 15!!! I still had 57 pages left!

I don’t want to be mean to Scott here. I will say this. He takes a lot of chances with this pilot. He goes for it. And I appreciate that. But if I’m 15 pages in and I’m struggling in every single scene to have even the barest idea of what’s going on, that doesn’t bode well for me wanting to continue reading.

There’s something to be said about the old adage, just tell a good story. Don’t overtell it. Don’t insert yourself into it. Don’t over-stylize it. The ultimate goal is for the reader to forget they’re reading a story. That’s hard to do when you’re trying to show off. When you’re having characters only answer questions on their blackboard when they’re perfectly capable of answering normally.

The biggest problem is that there’s no continuity here. We’re being shaken like a polaroid picture. We’re watching a guy walk a tightrope between the Twin Towers, we’re shooting people from a rooftop, we’re in a history class, we’re in a tornado, we’re at a hockey game, we’re on a plane.

I’m guessing this is what Scott was going for. He didn’t want a smooth ride. And I’m not going to tell you that herky-jerky storytelling doesn’t work. There are cases where it does work. 500 Days of Summer, for example, tells its story in a herky-jerky style.

But the thing with herky-jerky storytelling is that every single other component of the writing has to be perfect. Cause if we’re also confused about OTHER PARTS of the story, now you’re just asking too much of the reader. Readers don’t go into scripts wanting to read every scene three times so that they can understand what’s happening. And that happened constantly here.

For example, halfway into the script you throw out that Leighton is invisible to everyone but Sinth. And sometimes Sinth talks through writing instead of speaking. It’s too much. I always remind writers that one of the quickest ways to lose a reader is lack of clarity. There is nothing that will make a reader check out faster than confusion. Especially if it’s regarding basic story points that shouldn’t require extra thought.

It should be noted that my known preference is simple easy-to-understand concepts and narratives. So, in Scott’s defense, this was going to have to tough time with me even if the execution was great. I applaud him for going after it and trying something different but it just wasn’t my thing.

I’m going to review Nowhere Girl next Friday. I know that script and it deserves a review. So if you want to join in that conversation, read the script here.

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

What I learned: Avoid try-hard writing, both in description and dialogue. Seeing a writer try hard to impress is no different than the 12-year-old boy desperately doing skateboarding tricks to get the pretty girl’s attention. The fact that you want to impress her so badly is exactly what pushes her away. Here are a couple of examples from On This Day In History that felt too try-hard…

You’ve had 72 hours to gain some distance from the screenplay you wrote in two weeks.

Wait. TWO WEEKS!? How in the world were you able to write a screenplay in TWO WEEKS??

Oh yeah. Because of me. :)

Prep 1, Prep 2, Prep 3, Prep 4, Prep 5, Prep 6, Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6, Day 7, Day 8, Day 9, Day 10, Day 11, Day 12, Day 13, Day 14

But as we all know, a first draft is merely an accumulation of ideas. The rewrites are where you begin connecting those ideas. The rewrites are where you turn your script into an actual screenplay.

So what’s the first thing you should do in a rewrite?

Here’s what I suggest.

Read through your script but don’t focus on anything technical. Forget about first act turns and infusing the right kind of conflict into a scene. You want to put yourself in the mind OF A READER. Not enough writers do this. They only focus on what they’re putting out and not what people are taking in.

In order to do this, you have to remove judgment of your work and you have to turn off the logical side of your brain. These things are only going to get in the way.

All you should be focusing on is HOW YOU FEEL. You want to chart your mood. This is important at this stage because you still don’t know your story that well. That means you’re still able to emotionally react to things. That ability won’t be there in Draft 6. By that point, you’ll have been through the script so many times, you’ll only be able to see structure and mechanics.

You want to keep track of two things in particular. When are you engaged? And when are you bored?

As long as you want to keep turning pages, that’s “GOOD.” But when turning those pages becomes a chore, that’s “BAD.” Try and track, as accurately as you can, where these feelings start and stop. So for example, it might look like this:

Page 1 – 7 GOOD
Page 8-10 BAD
Page 11-14 GOOD

You can be more specific if you want. I’ve been known to add “GREAT,” “AWFUL,” “VERY GOOD,” “BORED OUT OF MY MIND.” I’ll leave that up to you. But it’s going to become a helpful resource when you’re all finished because you’ll have a visual map for where your script is working and where it isn’t.

Once you identify spots where it isn’t working, you can go back to where that boredom started and figure out what changed in the script to cause that boredom.

You might find, for example, that seven of your ‘BAD’ sections had a certain character in them, which would confirm that that character isn’t working. The same with subplots. A certain subplot you thought was imperative when you wrote the script ended up being boring in the execution.

After you’ve done your emotional tracking, go back to each weak section and ask a simple question: “Why doesn’t this work?” You don’t have to be an expert screenplay analyzer to answer this question like yours truly. You can answer it in plain English. “This location they’re in is boring.” “This conversation is dumb.” “I don’t care if John wants to break up with Linda or not.” “This character is the most annoying person on the planet.”

From there, ask yourself another simple question. “How can I make it better?”

“The location they’re in is boring.” Okay, maybe you’re placing them in too safe of an environment. Instead of allowing your characters to speak in private, put them at a dinner party where they’re forced to converse quietly because they don’t want everyone else to hear their business.

“This conversation is dumb.” Maybe the conversation is only revealing exposition or backstory – a quick way to Boredom Town. Add some conflict. Add some drama to the scenario. Maybe Sara is still mad at Ron about staying out late night with his drinking buddies and that subtext has made its way into today’s conversation about taking the kids to school.

“I don’t care if John wants to break up with Linda or not.” Maybe you never established Linda as a person we like. Maybe you never established how much John needs her in his life. Had you done both those things, we’d care more about a potential break up.

“This character is the most annoying person on the planet.” Maybe the character simply isn’t working, no matter how much you liked them conceptually. Sometimes the best answer is to get rid of something, whether it be a character, a subplot, or a scene. A good screenwriter is like a good general manager for a sports team. They’re able to let something go, no matter how emotionally attached they are, if it’s the right thing for the team.

Once you’ve identified all your weak spots and written down all of your solutions, you can put together a new outline. Your new outline will look a lot like your old outline but this one will focus on what you need to fix rather than what you need to create. You’ll write stuff like, “Matrix Training Scenes: These are the scenes where we really need to sell how little Neo believes in himself. Extra emphasis on the fall during the building jump. Extra emphasis on his struggle to keep up with Morpheus in the dojo fight.”

I encourage you to be as detailed as you can be. Rewrites are when you start to see your movie past the surface level. You start to understand your characters’ motivations better. You start to see how previously separate plotlines can connect. You start to see common themes pop up. So don’t be afraid to be a little “mad scientist” when you’re putting together this outline. Write down every little thought you have. The more help you can give yourself when it’s time to write, the better.

Finally, every draft of your script should feel bigger, faster, and stronger. So many of the scripts I read don’t feel like movies. They feel like pleasant constructed stories that are mildly entertaining. Movies need to be larger than life! Even character pieces. The experiences the characters go through need to be bigger than the average experience we go through in life. Why? Because if all you’re giving us is real life, why would we pay to see that? We already have it for free.

So make the key moments in your script BIGGER. Keep adding urgency to any slow areas so that your script feels FASTER. And make sure the stakes in all of the key areas of your script are high. If there aren’t major consequences to your characters failing, we’re not going to care. That was my issue with yesterday’s script. If the wedding didn’t happen, they could just get married at a courthouse. It didn’t matter. Doing that will make your script STRONGER.

So get back in there and kill it on the rewrite so you’re ready when The Last Great Screenplay Contest deadline rolls around.

Good luck!

Genre: Comedy
Premise: When a young man can’t come up with enough money for his wedding, he’s forced to enlist the help of his estranged crazy grandmother, who will only provide the dough if he helps her kill herself.
About: This script finished on last year’s Black List with 12 votes. This is writer Patrick Cadigan’s breakthrough screenplay.
Writer: Patrick Cadigan
Details: 111 pages

Everybody in town thinks that when the pandemic is over, Hollywood’s going to want to buy a bunch of dramatic pandemic material.

I’m sure a couple of those projects will sell.

But if you’re looking for to play the smart money, it’s going to be in comedy. In times of stress, people want to laugh. So expect every studio to stock up on comedy projects. Netflix especially. They have the fastest concept-to-distribution model by far. So they can get a lot of these comedies in front of our eyes quickly.

Speaking of comedies, I’m happy that today’s script doesn’t involve a group of female characters going on a raunchy trip together, since that’s all Hollywood was buying for a good five years there. We might actually get back to seeing a variety of comedy projects. Let’s see if “Grandma” starts us off on the right foot.

30-something Ben works the phones at a dying insurance company. So while his career isn’t exactly on the upswing, he does have Mary, his partner-in-crime fiance who he’ll be marrying in a few months.

Mary is perfect in every way except for one. HER FAMILY. They suck. In fact, her father, George, corners Ben at a family gathering and informs him he can’t pay for their wedding. Which means Ben is going to have to come up with 30 grand.

This forces Ben to call his grandmother, Minnie. Minnie is one feisty old broad who tells it how it is. When Ben’s parents died unexpectedly when he was a child, Minnie raised him. The two never got along and Ben escaped the second he was of age to do so. He hasn’t talked to Minnie since.

Ben explains his predicament to Minnie and she comes up with an idea. She’s been planning to euthanize herself for years but she’s needed a family member to sign off on it. If Ben signs the suicide papers, she’ll give him the money.

Ben is thrilled with the arrangement… until he learns that they have to wait 30 days for the suicide. Which means Minnie will be helping Ben and Mary plan the wedding. When she suspects that Mary’s family is a bunch of cheating lying sleazeballs, there’s a good chance that she’s going to blow this wedding up before Ben and Mary can walk down the aisle.

Let’s start off with the good.

A comedy about a wedding where the love story isn’t about the bride and the groom, but rather the groom and his grandmother, was clever. I loved how, at the end, when the priest is reading the vows, Ben stops because he wants to go get his grandmother. It’s the the exact opposite of these “last minute sprint to the wedding” climaxes.

Also, this movie will get made.

It’s basically Bad Grandma and just like Bad Grandpa was able to get Robert DeNiro so it could make its movie, this will get an older famous female actress that ensures this moves into production as well.

But I don’t have any praise beyond that.

One of the hardest things about comedies is getting the balance between plot and comedy right. I’ve read hundreds of failed comedy scripts where my critique was, “You focused so much on the humor that the plot fell apart.” I’ve read almost as many failed comedies where my critique was, “You were so obsessed with structuring this thing that you squeezed out all the comedy.”

The best comedy scripts balance these two things.

Unfortunately, “Grandma” falls into the latter category. It’s so plot-centric that there aren’t any stand-out scenes. In fact, the only stand-out lol scene in the script is the opening flashback funeral (for Ben’s parents).

It shouldn’t be surprising that that’s the only scene that isn’t structurally attached to the story. It’s a flashback separate from everything. Without the constraints of plot, Cadigan only had to worry about being funny. Which is probably why it was the only scene that made us laugh.

Another problem is that Cadigan can’t decide whether Grandma is a comedic character or a straight up caricature. A caricature is a one-dimensional cartoonish character built solely for laughs. Mr. Chow in The Hangover is a caricature.

A comedic character is someone who’s funny, even goofy, but who we actually care about. Jack Byrnes in Meet the Parents is a comedic character.

Cadigan seems to shift Grandma between these two classifications when it’s convenient. She’s a loud-talking swear-a-minute pistol through many of the early scenes. But in the second half, we’re asked to see her as this fully fleshed-out human being with flaws. In the wise words of LaVar Ball – “Pick a lane.”

Finally, I never cared enough about the wedding.

Those are the stakes, right? If Grandma doesn’t help Ben, they can’t have the wedding. But does that mean he’ll lose Mary? Can’t they just get married in Vegas or at the courthouse instead? I never felt like the wedding falling through was the end of the relationship. So the stakes were never high enough.

Contrast this with Meet the Parents where you felt that if Greg didn’t win Jack over, he was going to lose his fiance. They did a great job establishing how much stock she put into her father’s approval.

But let’s be real. LOLs trump all. If you make this funny, we’ll overlook any issues. I’ve consulted on scripts like this before and what I tell the writer is to go through every single big scene and make it as funny as you can without worrying about the plot. Just come up with the funniest possible scenario you can think of.

Then, after you’ve done that, go back and gently edit those scenes so that they retain their new hilariousness but also fit back into the plot, even if that fit isn’t as perfect as before. Again, if we’re laughing, we’re not thinking about whether the script performed a proper “break into Act 2.”

Not a bad script but it’s going to need a few rewrites to get where it wants to be.

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

What I learned: The stakes have to be present in the logline. If the stakes feel weak in the logline, you need to rethink your concept. Guys needing to find their kidnapped friend and get him back to his wedding within 24 hours (The Hangover) – high stakes. Guys trying to tag the one friend in their group who’s never been tagged yet before his wedding (Tag) – low stakes. The stakes for this wedding never felt that high to me.

Genre: Thriller/Horror
Premise: Two years after a free solo accident nearly killed her, a fearless climber enlists the help of her old climbing partners to document her comeback.
About: This script finished number 2 on last year’s Hit List. It was part of a bidding war that Netflix won. Netflix always wins. The project will be produced by Ridley Scott and directed by his son, Jake Scott.
Writer: Colin Bannon
Details: 112 pages

You guys know I’m all about the Free Solo.

The more time I can spend with Alex Honnald’s people, the happier I am. So when I found out there was a free solo spec script, by golly I had to read it!

35 year old Hillary Hall is the best female free solo climber in the world. She’s got an achilles heel, though. She’s arrogant. And that arrogance leads to her downfall, literally, when in the opening scene she slips and falls off the rock cliff.

Lucky for Hillary, she hit a branch on the way down, which slowed her fall enough that when she plunged into the forest, she was able to survive. Two years later, after lots of rehabbing, Hillary wants to climb again. And she’s got her sights set on a virgin wall – the Diyu Shan, 4000 feet of sheer granite in the Sichuan Province of China.

She gets the band back together – the documentary crew who filmed her now infamous fall – to create a comeback story. The leader and head photographer, Neil, is game. He knows Hillary is his path to stardom, maybe even an Oscar. Rounding out the crew are Jen, a scrappy cameraperson, and Ernie, the guy who tried to save Hillary from falling that day and failed.

Off the crew head to China where they immediately start getting bad vibes. Their driver tells them a couple of Americans came here months ago and died on the cliff, their bodies never found. And when they reach the actual cliff, they see a giant cave right in the middle of the ascent, like a mouth waiting to gobble them up.

The good news is, they’re going to be using ropes this time. And Neil’s going up with her. This is a “first ascent” which you can’t do solo. Every foot you ascend is a mystery so you need to be safe. However, it turns out that climbing is the least of their worries. Hillary begins seeing visions of the two men who died on the cliff.

And back on ground control, Ernie becomes convinced that the wall is alive. That it’s going to kill all of them. Needless to say, this turns out to be anything but your average ascent. There’s a good chance that none of the crew is leaving this mountain alive. That’s what you get when you don’t bring Alex Honnold with you.

It’s been over two weeks so I was stoked to get back to reviewing scripts. Thirty pages into this thing, I was salivating. It was exactly what I was hoping for.

And then things started to take a turn.

So here’s the thing.

We’re all looking for that +1.

We’ve got the script idea but wouldn’t it better if we had that ONE EXTRA ELEMENT to put it over the top?!

In theory, that’s a good way to think when constructing a movie concept. But, in reality, 1 + 0 can equal 3 and 1 + 1 can equal 0.

Confused?

Let me clarify. Sometimes, you already have everything you need. You don’t need a +1. Take Rocky for example. Can you have a +1’d Rocky where you turn him into a boxing cyborg? Sure. But you already had a great story about an underdog boxer who takes on the heavyweight champion to begin with. That’s enough to entertain an audience on its own… as long as the execution is good.

And that’s where screenwriters get scared. They don’t know if they can execute the basic story so they add on some horror or supernatural element for insurance.

Which is what happened here, in my opinion.

This was a good character-piece with a marketable hook all on its own. The world’s best free solo climber nearly falls to her death then rehabs to make a comeback two years later on a never-before-climbed wall in China. There’s plenty to work with there, especially from a character development perspective.

Making the mountain a ghost isn’t a bad idea. I was just never convinced the movie needed to go there.

Also, you should always be wary of concepts that allow you to use the “Am I going crazy” trope to create scary moments then never have to explain whether those moments really happened or not. It’s a straight up cheat and while audiences will give you a couple of those in every horror movie, they don’t want you doing it every other scene. It just becomes this ongoing cock tease where you’re not really committing to one side or the other. Is it a drama and they’re just imagining all this? Or is the mountain really attacking them?

It’s not that you can’t make this work but audiences don’t like being fucked with for too long. Sooner or later, they want an answer. And this script doesn’t give them one until the final minute.

With that said, the script manages to finish the climb.

It’s got as clear of a structure as you’re going to find (goal – get to the top, stakes – if you fail, you die). There’s no urgency, per se, but you don’t need urgency if your timeframe is tight. We know this is a 2 day climb so we’re not clamoring for the story to speed up. We know when it’s going to end.

There are also some fun checkpoints Bannon plays with. We’ve got that mysterious cave halfway up. What’s in there? And they’ve already been told that the final stretch is a ‘point of no return’ situation. Once you get past that point, the only way off the mountain is up.

You always want things looming in your story. Give us stuff not just to look forward to – looking forward is good – but stuff to WORRY ABOUT. That’s the real special sauce that keeps us reading. I knew that cave and that point of no return were coming at some point which made me want to keep reading.

Also, Bannon makes his best choice of the script once we reach the point of no return. Hillary has to climb the last stretch of the mountain solo.

This is a tough one to rate because it’s one of those situations where I wanted a different story than the writer wanted to tell. So I can’t ding him for not giving me what I wanted. But I really think he missed an opportunity to tell a compelling character piece about a woman making an impossible comeback in the most dangerous sport in the world.

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

What I learned: When the size of something is a major component of your story, you must provide a reference for the reader. We’re told Diyu Shan is 4000 feet tall. I have a vague idea of how tall that is but I have no visual reference for that. Bannon clears that up for us with this line: “That’s higher than the Twin Towers stacked on top of each other.” That’s something I can visualize. — Remember that screenwriting is about helping the reader visualize the movie. Anything you can do in your description to facilitate that, do it.

Congratulations!

You’ve finished your script. Now what???

Before I answer that question, let’s talk about productivity, since that was a common theme that came up throughout this challenge.

At one point or another, everyone battled with putting words on the page.

From what I could tell, these issues fell into two categories.

Category one was writer’s block. You could open the script but you didn’t have any ideas for what to write.

Category two was resistance. You couldn’t muster the motivation to even open the document up and write.

Of the two, writer’s block is more manageable because it’s a temporary bump in the road. You’ve reached a point in the screenplay you don’t have ideas for and because it’s harder to come up with a solution than it is to give up for the day, you often chose to give up.

This is why it’s helpful to have a page count per day. It’s a psychological hack. If you know that you have to hit a certain page count, you won’t care that you don’t have the solution. You’ll push through. But if your only criteria for writing is that you have the perfect answers, chances are you won’t write anything.

I get that some people don’t like to write this way. They’d rather write nothing than write something bad. But in the grand scope of screenwriting, it’s a lot easier to work with something than it is with nothing. So write in that imperfect scene or sequence knowing that, with some distance, you’ll be able to come back later and make it better.

The second issue – resistance – is a much bigger problem that can be broken down into its own two categories.

The first is you’re not connecting with this particular script idea on an emotional level. There’s nothing you feel passionate about in the story, whether it be thematic or the characters themselves. One of the reasons Jordan Peele was able to keep working on Get Out for nearly a decade was because he had something to say about race. If his story was just about bringing home a boyfriend to some weird parents, he never finishes that script.

Or the recent spec sale, “Shut In,” about a recovering meth addict trying to save her children from an abusive husband. I’m guessing the writer, Melanie Toast, had an intense emotional connection with that main character. She may not have been a drug addict herself but maybe she’d been in an abusive relationship before and having her heroine overcome that issue helped her find closure with that abuse from her own past.

You’re more likely to get up and write every morning when you’re connected that deeply with your material. So get in there and create some characters that you have an emotional connection to!

The second is that you have some deep blockage when it comes to writing. Maybe it’s a pursuit of perfectionism. Maybe you don’t believe that you’re good enough. Maybe you experienced some screenwriting trauma whereby you wrote something you were proud of and everyone who read it didn’t like it. Maybe you’ve beat your head on the door so many times without getting in that you think, “What’s the point anymore?”

It’s hard to sit down and write anything when you’ve got that going on in your head.

But it should comfort you to know that every artist goes through this on some level. You’re not alone. In fact, I was just watching a video the other day from a successful guy in a separate craft who I considered one of the most confident people I’d come across. And, out of nowhere, he conceded that he still struggles with a basic belief in himself. That was shocking to hear because I never would’ve guessed that with him.

The difference is he didn’t allow it to cripple him. He felt it but he didn’t let it win. Which leads me to a couple of solutions for you.

One, look into the self-critic. Writers are particularly susceptible to the self-critic because they’re in their minds all the time. This breeds a nice warm nest for the self-critic to operate in.

Eckhart Tolle is the most respected voice in silencing our inner critic but there are newer books out there which offer new tools to take the self-critic on. I can tell you from my own experience that learning how the self-critic operates has helped me become a mentally stronger individual. You’d be amazed at how much more productive you can be when you’re not spending 75% of your mental energy each day beating away the guy in your head who tells you you suck.

Finally, you may need to reevaluate how you approach writing. If you’re approaching writing in a manner by which you’ll only be happy once you become rich and successful, you are not going to become rich and successful. In addition to handicapping you mentally, artists don’t create their best stuff when their only motivation is success. They achieve their best stuff when they have something to say.

So instead of trying to write something amazing that brings you tons of money and success, write to have fun. Write for yourself. That’s the whole reason you started writing to begin with, right? Well let’s get back to that. Once that becomes your definition of happiness, everything else is gravy.

Okay, getting back on track here.

You’ve just finished your script. Now what?

Some people will tell you to leave it alone for two weeks. Let it sit there. Get some distance from it. That way you can read it objectively and see what you’ve got. I’m not sure that applies here. We’ve written this so fast that I’m not sure we know what we wrote. So if you’re not burned out, read the thing right now! See what you’ve got!

If you see potential in the story, start a new document and write down ideas for the second draft. Usually, in first drafts, we’re coming up with all these new ideas in the second half of the screenplay. A second draft is about moving some of these ideas up into the first half. For example, if you unexpectedly realized that a secondary character is a lot more interesting than you thought they were, give them a bigger storyline in the first half of the screenplay.

One of the less heralded screenplay lessons I’ve learned is the importance of identifying which characters are working and which aren’t. Don’t get locked in to who gets the most screen time just because that’s how you originally conceived them. If one of your characters is killing it, give us more of them! Likewise, if someone isn’t working, throw them out.

From there, you’re just trying to identify the 2-3 biggest issues in the script and come up with solutions for those. For example, if your main character is boring, ask yourself, “How can I make her less boring?” It might be adding a sense of humor. It might be giving her a more controversial backstory. It might be making her more active.

You’re not trying to build Rome in the second draft. You’re just trying to build upon the potential of your first draft.

I’m really happy for everyone who participated in this and wrote an entire screenplay through this exercise! You now have a great base for a screenplay that, with some intense rewriting, you’ll have ready to go by the time the Last Great Screenwriting Contest deadline rolls around.

I’ll be taking tomorrow off but I will see everyone on Tuesday with a script review. :)