Genre: Romantic Comedy
Premise: When her childhood best friend returns from abroad with his new fiance, a lonely med school dropout must figure out how to tell him that she’s in love with him.
About: Today’s script finished number 2 on the Hit List. It was also a semi-finalist in the Nicholl. It was written by Tisch School of Arts graduate, Lauren Minnerath. For those wondering how to get your scripts read, do what Minnerath did. Enter every major writing competition and fellowship there is. For example, Minnerath was also a 2017 HBO Access Writing Fellowship finalist.
Writer: Lauren Minnerath
Details: 108 pages
After the disaster that was yesterday’s short story, it’s nice to be reintroduced to a writer who can actually write. And in the romantic comedy genre, no less, a genre that was so dead at one point that the go-to leading man was Jason Segal.
But thanks to the Romcom Resurgence, led by Netflix, we can rejoice in the revival of these fluffy equivalents to reading tabloid magazines in the supermarket line. It’s easy to understand why romcoms were once at the top of the spec mountain. They’re all dialogue. The stories are easy to follow. And because description is minimal, you can barrel through them in less than 60 minutes. From someone who just read a 130 page screenplay with 40+ characters set in Russia during World War 1, you can imagine how welcome this is.
But the defining reason today’s screenplay stands out is that it does what no other romcom screenplay has been able to do in 30 years. I’m going to tell you what that is in a minute. But first, let me tell you what “Everything Happens” is about.
Like a lot of New Yorkers in their 20s, Leah’s trying to figure her life out. After failing out of med school, a secret she keeps from everyone, Leah spends most of her time waiting tables and playing The Sims. “I’ve removed all doors, toilets, and sources of food and happiness from the house and now I’m watching as my Sims slowly degrade into starvation, uncleanliness, and death,” she tells her friend.
Leah’s best friend since junior high school is Mitch, a handsome money manager who’s finally making the move back to the US from England. Leah’s happy to hear that Mitch is breaking up with his gorgeous perfect English girlfriend, Charlotte, because, you guessed it, Leah’s secretly in love with Mitch! Except when Mitch arrives, he’s brought a surprise with him. Charlotte! “We changed our minds. We’re getting married!” he tells Leah. yaaaaaay.
Leah hates Charlotte in all of her pretentiousness and thinks she’s totally wrong for Mitch, but when the two grab some drinks, she warms up to her. (MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD). But apparently Leah doesn’t know where the warm-up line ends, because that night she goes back to Charlotte’s apartment and they make out.
Feeling all the guilt in the world, Leah is horrified at what she’s done. But pretty soon Charlotte is pursuing her morning, day, and night. This perfect woman is too much for an ordinary New York girl to resist so Leah begins a “We shouldn’t be doing this but we’re still doing it anyway” affair with her. When Mitch returns from a work vacation, it’s time for Leah to sort things out and figure out what she wants to do. But when all of their secrets come tumbling into the open, Leah will need to decide if Charlotte is worth losing her best friend over.
For those of you freaking out about the First Ten Pages Challenge – thinking it’s an impossible standard to live up to, you’ll be happy to note that today’s script starts with a video chat. If you were to tell me that you were voluntarily starting your screenplay with a video chat, I would come to your house, knock on your door, take your hand, lead you to the Uber in your driveway that I ordered, hand you a plane ticket, and tell you to leave Los Angeles forever. So the fact that the number 2 script on the Hit List did this is an indication that First Ten Pages perfection is not required in all circumstances.
With that said, the pages were still light and easy to read. So even if I wasn’t bowled over by the content, it cost me little to keep reading. And you can’t forget that this script is accompanied by a “second best spec script of 2018” tag, something that gives it more leeway than a random spec script from a writer you’ve never heard. So make decisions like this at your own risk.
Now I bet you’re all wondering what I was chirping about earlier – how this romcom excels where so many others fail. Well, gather round cause I’m about to tell’ya. The main thing that killed the romcom was predictability. It was the single easiest genre to predict. Guy gets girl, guy loses girl, guy gets girl back. For awhile, people defended this. “But,” they said, “It’s not about the destination. It’s about the journey!” While there’s some truth to that statement, let’s be honest, the predictability of these movies became unbearable.
What “Everything Happens” manages to pull off is, for once, you don’t know how things are going to end. That’s because Minnerath cleverly constructs a scenario that doesn’t have a simple solution. Leah falls for her best friend’s fiance. On the one hand, you’re thinking she could end up with Charlotte. But then would she really do that to her best friend? Conversely, once she sleeps with Charlotte, you can’t imagine any scenario where Mitch would find out about this and want to be with Leah.
To convey just how clever this is, consider the alternative, which is what I usually end up reading. Leah meets Charlotte who, in this version, is engaged to a random guy Leah doesn’t know. If Charlotte were to have an affair with Leah under those circumstances, is there any doubt they would end up together? Of course not. It’s the best friend thing that has us stumped. And when you don’t know what’s going to happen next, you’re way more invested in the story. Which is why this was such a good read.
And for those of you hemming and hawing about how dare I suggest you can’t predict a romcom, put your money where you mouth is (or at least your internet dignity). Based on my plot summary, comment what you think happens at the end. Post it. Then go check and see if you’re right. You weren’t, were you? That’s good writing.
On top of this, I liked that Minnerath took chances. A lot of writers would resist a choice that has their main character betray their best friend. How is anyone going to root for that character, would be the argument. As such, they’d shy away from the choice and instead write something safer. But it’s that risk that makes this screenplay so compelling. You don’t have a script if you’re not wondering how Leah is going to navigate this.
The execution of “Everything Happens” is as good as you’re going to get in this genre. If you’re wondering how Minnerath pulled that off, it comes down to making a bold choice at the midpoint. That’s when Leah and Charlotte are first with one another. The screenplay went from a fun harmless romcom to something darker, more daring, and unpredictable. If you write in the comedy or romcom genres, you’ll definitely want to check this one out.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Have things tugging at your character. “Tugs” add depth and, more importantly, character realism. Here, Leah has her MCAT test tugging at her. Her mom keeps reminding her about it. Mitch reminds her. Her sucky days at work remind her. These tiny slices of real life annoyance can make even the simplest characters feel real.
Genre: Horror?
Premise: Three Korean girls who have been adopted by American suburban families have their friendship tested when they conjure up a spell that releases their “mother.”
About: Today’s short story sold at the end of last year after being involved in a bidding war. Five offers came in, with Fox 2000 and 21 Laps winning the grand prize. The short story was written by Alice Sola Kim who won something called the “Whiting Award” in 2016. This short story was published on tinhouse.com and can be read here.
Writer: Alice Sola Kim
Details: Equivalent of 15-20 pages long
Is the short story the new spec script?
Maybe not. But nothing’s gotten closer to replicating the spec sale in the last two years than the short story sale. They’re all the rage, with a couple of new ones picked up every month.
While I know nothing about today’s writer, I suspect from her name (Alice Sola Kim) that she is of Korean heritage (Kim) adopted by American parents (Sola). If that’s the case, this appears to be a personal story. Isn’t that what they say to do? Write what you know? Or, the R version, “Work your personal shit out through your writing?” I’m excited. If Kim is using her own life experiences to tell this story, doing so through the marketable genre of horror, I’m betting it’s going to be an emotionally moving portrait of adoption that can be marketed to the masses. Let’s check it out.
Teenagers Mia, Caroline, and Ronnie are Koreans adopted into American families. That’s how they met, actually, during a gathering for Koreans adopted into American families. These three understand each other in a way the outside world couldn’t possibly comprehend. Mia is the fun alternative one. Caroline is the sophisticated one. And Ronnie is the misfit.
One day, as teenagers are wont to do, the three chant a spell in a parking lot, only to later realize they’ve unleashed their mother. Not their adopted mother. Not their birth mother. But some nebulous afterlife creature who refers to herself as their mother.
This “mother” communicates to the three of them by taking over their brains and speaking through their mouths. The things she says make less sense than your average homeless man on Santa Monica and Colorado (“THIS IS A SONG MY MOTHER SANG TO ME WHEN I DIDN’T WANT TO WAKE UP FOR SCHOOL. IT CALLS THE VINES DOWN TO LIFT YOU UP AND—“). It’s not clear what this mother is trying to accomplish other than be annoying, which she’s an expert at.
As “Mother” is passed around between the girls, we impatiently wait for some sort of plot to arrive. It never does, unfortunately, making you wonder just how frivolously this was written. Eventually, to teach the girls a lesson, “mother” crashes their car into a tree one night. However, just when we think something substantial has happened in this godforsaken story, we cut back to the car, still driving, to learn that they’re all safe, and that “mother” was just teaching them a “lesson.” The End.
Before I get to my reaction, I want to make something clear. I don’t blame Alice Kim for this. It’s not her fault that she wrote a story that’d be dismissed by 99% of college English professors, yet still was able to sell it. Good for her. We should all be so lucky as to sell our weaker material. I don’t blame the original producer, who did an amazing job conning Hollywood into thinking this story was worth buying. That’s what a good producer does (A famous Hollywood agent once said, “Sell a good script? Pfft. Anybody can do that. Sell a bad script? Now that’s when you know you’re a good agent.”).
I blame the production company and studio that purchased this. If you’re trying to figure out who made the mistake here, they’re the one you point the finger towards.
There are two reasons why this sale annoys me so much. The first is it confuses aspiring writers. Writers read this glorified writing exercise, see that it sold, and believe that this is the bar. When it isn’t. It’s an outlier, a purchase that was likely inspired by reasons that have little to do with the story’s quality. Second, it’s taking the place of material that’s ACTUALLY good. There’s a lot of stuff out there that’s so much more deserving than this. But instead the winning lottery spot goes to Rambling Teenage Girls and Their Ghost Mom.
I mean here’s a typical paragraph from “Daughters.”
Imagine 20 pages of that.
While the rules for short stories are definitely different from screenwriting, there is one commonality. There needs to be a plot. There needs to be a point to it all. The opening to “Daughters,” which dives into our friends’ lives, does so messily. “At midnight we parked by a Staples and tried some seriously dark fucking magic. We had been discussing it for weeks and could have stayed in that Wouldn’t it be funny if groove forever, zipping between yes, we should and no, we shouldn’t until it became a joke so dumb that we would never. But that night Mini had said, “If we don’t do it right now, I’m going to be so mad at you guys, and I’ll know from now on that all you chickenheads can do is talk and not do,” and the whole way she ranted at us like that, even though we were already doing and not talking, or at least about to.” And that’s fine. When we’re meeting our heroes, you can be messy as long as we’re getting to know the characters who will later lead us on our journey.
But at a certain point, you have to introduce the reason the story exists. What is it our characters are trying to achieve (their goal)? Only then does your story have purpose. Doing so here would’ve been easy. You bring in the mother character. You have her do something awful, and now they need to get rid of her. But, instead, “Daughters,” focuses more on the positive aspects of “mother.” Her appearance is championed, her words idolized.
It’s only at the very last second that the group decides Mother is bad, as if the writer realized that she needed to end her story somehow and, oh yeah, if the mother is bad, then they would have to eliminate her. Instead of being a major plotline, however, it’s relegated to the last 500 words of the story. And this is how I know this was written at 3 am with not a lick of rewriting. It’s a story that was thoughtlessly blasted onto the page so it could be turned into a professor before sunrise.
And who is this mother ANYWAY??????
You all have different birth parents. Why do you only have one mother? Why don’t any of them realize that if someone’s claiming to be their unique mother, she can’t be everyone’s mother? Am I speaking alien here? That makes sense, right? And this is what bothers me about this type of writing. The writer doesn’t want to do the hard work of figuring out the answer to that question. It’s easier to keep it raw, place the onus on the audience to do the work, and in the best of circumstances, trick everyone into believing they’ve made some profound statement about motherhood.
So is there a movie here? That’s the only question that matters, right?
The answer is no.
But if I were paid a million dollars to come up with an angle, I guess I would have these girls unleash an evil mother that starts killing those around them and they have to figure out how to put the genie back in the bottle before there’s too much death and destruction. Which is just like every other horror movie but, hey, they paid all this money for the rights. They need a movie. That’s as good as they’re going to get.
[x] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: No story can be saved through prose. No story can be saved through internal monologue. No story can be saved through shock tactics (it’s revealed that Ronnie’s involved in a incestual relationship with her brother late). You need a character goal to drive the plot. Without it, you’re just talking to yourself on the page.
Genre: Horror
Premise: Trapped in a strange house, a young woman with a phobia of dogs must escape the jaws of a bloodsucking hound and its master.
Why You Should Read:I find phobias fascinating. The crippling impact they can have on a person’s life. I wanted to take that fear to an extreme level. There seems to be room in the horror universe for an update on Cujo (other than a remake), pitting a protagonist against a vicious, bloodthirsty beast. I set out to write something simpler and more contained than my last work with 100x more blood. Hope you enjoy sinking your teeth into this one!
Writer: Katherine Botts
Details: 91 pages
Katherine is back. If my memory is correct, she’s 3 for 3 on winning Amateur Offerings. When a Katherine script comes in, a Katherine script tends to win. That’s my rhyme for the day. However, there’s some backstory here. Katherine’s been sending this script in for awhile and I wasn’t keen on featuring it. Not because I didn’t believe in her. But because the idea didn’t excite me. A mean dog after a person in a house? It sounded like the most straightforward predictable movie ever. I man Cujo is one of the only Stephen King books I haven’t read (for the same reason). Scary dogs don’t scare me. So I was going into this one with some prejudice. Would the script look up at me with puppy dog eyes and make me fall in love with it? Or would it bare its teeth and run away? Grab the leash and let’s walk this dog together to find out!
17 year old Blair is scarred for life – both literally and figuratively. When she was 7, a dog attacked her at a pool. She’s never been the same since. Also since that time, her father passed away. Her mom’s moved on with some lame-o named Nathanial. Blair’s plan is to save up enough money so she can fix her car and drive away from this place.
So when she gets a last second opportunity to house-sit for some richie riches, she grabs it. She arrives at the remote southern mansion where she meets the strange family – mother, father, son – who are leaving town because the mom’s father has fallen ill. Just before they’re about to leave, they blindside Blair by letting her know that, oh yeah, she has to take care of their new rescue dog, Jumper. Blair tries to back out of the job but gives in when they beg her.
As soon as they’re gone, Blair recruits her goofy boyfriend, Collin, to come keep her company. Collin, a dog lover, bonds with the rescue dog, encouraging Blair to give her a shot. No chance, Blair says. Dogs are evil. After the two raid the fridge, Collin falls asleep, and that’s when Blair sees it. Big scary eyes outside the window. A dog. And not just any dog. A huge beast of a dog.
Blair tries to shake Collin awake but there’s no response. She glances at the leftovers. Could they have been… drugged? As she yells at Collin to wake up, the beast-dog starts banging on the doors and windows. It’s only a matter of time before it gets in. She drags Collin to the old house elevator just as the dog breaks in, and they go up to the attic. It’s there where they meet old man Arthur. But wait, I thought the family was going to visit Arthur. What’s he doing here in the house?
It turns out Arthur is a vampire. That beast-dog thing is his servant. It finds him people, brings them to him, and he drinks their blood. Blair is able to escape this freakazoid, but now she’s right back in the bowels of the house, easy prey for Beast Dog. Blair will need to, ironically, depend on rescue dog, Jumper, to help her defeat this thing. But as the night unfolds, she realizes this entire family has planned everything to make sure she doesn’t leave alive.
First question that, no doubt, everyone will be asking after yesterday’s article. Does Blood Hound pass the First 10 Pages test? It’s hard for me to answer that because I knew I was reading this all the way through no matter what. So I was trying to imagine what I would’ve done if I had no obligation to the script. The answer is I probably would have stopped. But it wouldn’t have been an easy decision.
The opening scene is fun. Little girl at the pool. She wants a dog from her daddy. Sees a dog hiding in the bushes, goes to pet it. It attacks her. It was enough to keep me turning the pages. But I think the suspense could’ve been introduced earlier and drawn out more. The first part of the scene is her in a pool with her dad joking around. It’s not a bad scene at all. But if we’re grading the scene on the “Every word matters” curve, we could’ve hinted at danger earlier, which would’ve, in turn, allowed for Katherine to sneak in the character introductions via a more exciting scene wrapper.
The second scene (“10 Years Later”) is okay but it’s the very definition of “resting on your laurels.” You know you’ve started with this shocking opening scene. So you think, “I can relax now. They’ll allow me to be boring for a few pages while I set the characters up.” You can never rest on any laurels. I’m not asking for two teaser scenes in a row. But you should still be attempting to construct entertaining scenes after your first one.
But as the script goes on, it gets better. Katherine does a great job adding specificity to her world. Things happen because that’s how they would happen, not because the writer needs them to happen. An example would be the house-sitting. A lazy writer would make that a given. Blair’s housesitting tonight because she has to for the movie to exist. Katherine, however, explains that Blair wants out of this town. She needs money to fix dad’s car so she’s taking as many odd jobs as she can. The housesitting job, then, is a crucial step towards meeting that goal.
I also liked that the family had history. They were weird and mysterious. One of the things I worried about when I originally read the logline was that Blair would go to this house and then a dog would appear out of nowhere and start harassing her. It sounded too simplistic. But from the moment we get inside this house, the family seems interesting. There’s something odd going on with them and you want to keep reading to find out what it is.
The peak of the script for me was when I realized Jumper wasn’t the dog that was going to face off against Blair, but rather food for a bigger dog. That’s when I leaned in and really started reading with an invested eye. Once I figured out that she, too, was meant to be dog food, I was all in. At that point, the script was a double worth-the-read for me.
But then a controversial choice is made that people are either going to love or hate. I didn’t like it. And it comes down to “double mumbo-jumbo.” When I realized the old man, Arthur, was a vampire, my head fell. I thought I was reading a killer dog movie. Now it’d become a killer dog vampire movie. It was a bridge too far. After that, it was impossible for the script to win me back. I thought what Katherine had before this was plenty. It didn’t need a vampire kick.
With that said, I loved one other subplot in the script, which was Jumper going from enemy number one to best friend. I love any well-executed character arc. And Blair’s arc from being the last person in the world who would connect with a dog, to trusting her life to Jumper, was really heart-warming. Kudos to her for pulling that off.
But man, I really disliked the vampire thing. It felt like a writer who didn’t have the confidence that their idea was enough. So they had to add something extra. The irony is that I didn’t think the idea was enough when I started it either. But Katherine did such a good job building up this family and this house, that the original concept DID end up being enough. I mean, that’s some freaky shit. A family lures people into their house and then has their psycho dog eat them. That’s a movie right there.
Script link: Blood Hound
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Be careful with tropes, even if they’re well-regarded. An early scene has Young Blair crawling through the bushes to pet a dog. The dog growls at her. We sense the big attack coming. Then we cut to: “BLOOD flecks onto the old ball.” Yes, the cut away to blood splatter is a more “artful” way to express a violent attack than showing the violence. But if we’ve seen that trope a million times, is it any less lazy than showing the attack itself? I say this because I’ve read three scripts THIS WEEK that have used that trope. So push yourselves. Do something different. Maybe even show the attack. That might be the unexpected thing that makes the scene memorable.
A month ago, I was in the middle of reading a script and I was bored out of my mind. Whenever I’m bored, I instinctually check what page I’m on. So I looked up at the top of the screen and noted that I was on page: Four. That’s right, page four. How bad does a script have to be for the reader to already be bored by page four? Bad. And yet, this is common. Especially with amateur screenplays.
It occurred to me as this was happening that all screenwriting is is time-buying. You’re trying to buy more time with the reader. If you can promise them that that next page is going to be just as entertaining as this one, they will keep turning the pages. And nowhere is this more important than the first ten pages. Because the first ten are where you hook someone. If you can pull them in immediately and not let go, it acts as a promise – a promise to the reader that “I’m going to entertain you.” Once that trust is established, you have them.
This got me wondering: What if I threatened every writer that THE SECOND I was bored, I would stop reading their script? In other words, if I was bored at the end of the first page, I wouldn’t keep reading. If I was bored at the end of the first paragraph, I wouldn’t keep reading. If I was bored AT THE END OF THE FIRST SENTENCE, I wouldn’t keep reading. Would writers change the way they wrote their first ten pages? Of course they would. Every sentence they wrote, they would ask, “Will this keep the reader reading?” And I suspect that everybody using this strategy would become a markedly better writer in the process.
Now some of you are probably thinking, “This is unrealistic, Carson.” All it would do is result in a bunch of scripts catering to the ADD crowd. The literary equivalent of Michael Bay lining up a series of explosions. But here’s the thing – keeping someone entertained doesn’t mean dropping the reader into a firefight or an argument. It can mean that. But there’s more than one way to lead a horse to water.
Yesterday’s script is a perfect example. Promising Young Woman starts with a group of men leering at a hot drunken woman in a bar. Right away, we know something very bad has the potential of happening. So guess what? We keep reading to find out if it does. It’s a very simple dramatic storytelling device. And it’s ensured we will at least read until the end of this scene. No ADD-catering required.
Contrast this with the opening of Monday’s script. We’re in the aftermath of a giant accident and our hero’s daughter has died. The scene creates a little bit of mystery (“What caused this?”), which creates just enough momentum for me to begrudgingly read on. But as an opening scene, it’s weak. Nothing is happening. There’s no tension. There’s no suspense. There’s no conflict. All of that happened before the scene. All sorts of alarms go off when I see this. If there isn’t a single well-developed story skill in the opening scene, why would I think this writer had the skills to entertain me for the next 100 pages? And guess what? I was right. There were no storytelling skills on display for the rest of the script. The script was boring.
But let’s get back to my idea. What if you knew that the reader would stop reading your script the second they were bored? Would you become a better writer in those first ten pages? Would you focus more on entertaining the reader? I say you would. One of the best examples of this is a script that sold all the way back in 1994. It was the hottest spec of the year. Everyone was talking about it. And it went on to become a hit movie. Here’s the first page of that script…
Is there anyone here who can honestly say, “I was bored, I stopped reading?” A show of hands. That’s right. Not a single hand raised. This first page, from the script for “Scream,” is the embodiment of my philosophy. The script grabs you from the very first sentence, and there’s never a point after that where you can stop reading.
“ON A RINGING TELEPHONE.” Well duh, we have to find out who’s calling. Establish a 16 year old girl. “Innocent eyes.” Why point out she’s innocent? Might she be in danger in the coming lines? “Hello.” “Hello.” Silence. Bam, this conversation is already interesting. The person calling isn’t following normal protocol for a phone call (“Hi, is Jake home?”). They just say, “Hello.” Then silence. “Yes,” she asks. “Who is this?” he replies. Okay, now you really have me. The person who’s calling doesn’t get to say, “Who is this?” That’s the answerer’s duty. What’s going on here? I have to read more.
The conversation continues with the man asking questions he shouldn’t be asking. “What number is this?” Then answering her questions in a creepy way. “What number are you trying to reach?” “I don’t know.” “I think you have the wrong number.” “Do I?” Casey, trying to act above it, hangs up on him. “The phone RINGS again.” Casey answers the phone again. “Hello.” HOW CAN YOU NOT TURN THE PAGE after this? How can you not want to find out what happens next? This is how you write to keep the reader’s attention.
I know. I can already hear you zipping around the internet looking for examples of movies that start slowly. “Roma doesn’t start fast, Carson! Roma was nominated for an Academy Award!”
Come on, you’re smarter than this. Roma isn’t a spec script that needed to win over readers. If you are a writer-director, if your movie’s development is already paid for, if your movie is being fast-tracked, if you’re adapting a book, you do not need to worry about this problem. The irony is that all of these writers would do well to still abide by this philosophy. But they don’t, which is partially why so many of these movies are boring. Don’t forget your unique circumstance. You are a nobody whose only influence on someone is the words you write in this document. You’d be smart to use every one of those words wisely. Hook them and never let them go.
Okay, Carson, you’ve made great points as always. But how do we actually execute this plan? What’s the trick to writing an amazing first ten pages? Unfortunately, there’s no trick. But there are certain setups that work better than others. One of the best things you can do is identify all your favorite movie openings – movies that hooked you right away – Then ask, “How did they do that?”
One thing that we’ve identified that works is to place someone who’s helpless in harm’s way. That worked for us in Promising Young Woman. And it worked in Scream. It doesn’t have to be a woman. It can be a kid. Or, if you create a situation whereby a grown man is helpless in a situation, that might work as well.
Another theme of good early scenes is that we’re dropped into something important happening. We’re not dropped in afterwards (like Absence of Courage). We’re not dropped in five hours before (characters going about their everyday lives). We sense right away that something important is happening and therefore we want to find out what happens next. For example, if you opened on a woman in a boardroom sweating bullets, trying to act like she’s not sweating bullets, and we pull back to see she’s in an intense job interview, getting hammered with hard question after hard question, that could hook a reader.
Conversely, you can hook us in the build-up TO that interview. You could place that same job applicant in the waiting area, sweating bullets, going over her notes, trying to remember everything, eyeing the other applicants sitting nearby, all of whom are better looking and better dressed. If I’m dropped into that moment, I’m going to want to keep reading to see how that woman performs.
You could take that same character, however, and start with her waiting outside school to pick her daughter up, and you’ve lost us. It’s not the most boring thing you could start on. But there’s no importance attached to it. Where’s the suspense? Where’s the “reason to keep reading?”
Then again, with a little finagling, you could turn this scene into an interesting one. Focus on the woman waiting while all the other children come out and meet their parents. And with each passing kid that isn’t hers, there’s a looming sense of dread in our protagonist. She’s craning her neck. Looking at a few groups of girls chatting. Her daughter has to be around here somewhere. All of a sudden, a teacher approaches, a concerned look on her face. “Maggie?” she says to our protagonist. “What are you doing here?” “What do you mean? Where’s Tracy?” “You don’t remember? You called an hour ago. To say her uncle was picking her up.” We can see from Maggie’s eyes that she did not call an hour ago to say Tracy’s uncle was picking her up. And now we have to keep reading.
The real trick here is creating an interesting situation. Don’t plop us into some boring mundane scene. Come up with something that’s got some stakes attached to it. Someone’s in danger. Something’s gone wrong. There’s conflict involved. There’s mystery. Give us something that’s impossible to stop reading. And when you finish that first scene and you still have five pages left in your first 10, don’t rest on your laurels. Give us another scene we can’t stop reading. Hold yourself to the same standards you hold other writers to. You’re bored out of your mind reading other writers’ work. Well, then don’t do the same things they do.
So here’s how this is going to work. We’re having a First 10 Pages Contest. The one rule of this contest is that THE SECOND I’M BORED, I WILL STOP READING YOUR PAGES. If I’m bored in the first paragraph, I will stop reading. I have no problem giving up on your pages 20 seconds into them. Knowing this, will you become a better writer? That’s the experiment here.
I don’t know what the prize will be other than featuring the winners on the site. But I can tell you this. I’m not going to feature bad work. If not a single entry results in me reading the full ten pages, there will be no winner. I’m genuinely curious to see if anybody get can me to read the full ten. Because 99% of the time, I wouldn’t read past the first scene if I didn’t have to. I want you to really internalize that. Writing a screenplay isn’t this giant complicated process of navigating readers and agents and staying updated with trends and blah blah blah. It’s writing a series of words that make the person reading it want to keep reading. If you do that, you will be successful.
Submissions will be due a month from now on Sunday, February 10th, 11:59pm Pacific Time. Send a PDF of those pages to carsonreeves3@gmail.com with the subject line: FIRST TEN PAGES. No logline or synopsis needed. You can include a title page if you want. Up to you. You can send them starting today.
Let’s see who can pull this off. Oh, and one last reminder…
MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLE FOR ME TO STOP READING
Genre: Drama/Thriller
Premise: (from Black List) Still hurting years later from the suicide of her mistreated best friend, a woman is torn between seeking vengeance on the lost friend’s behalf and moving on with her life.
About: Emerald Fennell hardly came out of nowhere. The English actress/writer graduated from Oxford, is the daughter of famous jeweler Theo Fennell, played the Duchess on the Netflix series, The Crown, and is writing on the hot series, Killing Eve. This script finished with the sixth highest number of votes on last year’s Black List.
Writer: Emerald Fennell
Details: 106 pages
What’s the theme for this week? It appears to be revenge! Of all the scripts in the top 10, this one seemed the most unlikely. It’s not a biopic. It’s not a true story. It’s not an adaptation. It’s not a popular genre. It’s not high concept. Going off the logline, it sounds like we’re about to read a glorified Lifetime movie. For all these reasons, it’s gotta be great, right?! I mean, if a script can leap to the top of the Black List ranks without doing any of the things the Black List loves, it must be awesome. This year’s Daddio, maybe? Join me and let’s find out.
29 year-old Cassandra is not in a good way. The med school dropout works at a coffee shop and lives with her parents. Worse still, she spends her nights getting blasted in bars and dance clubs. That’s where we meet her in fact, alone, sloshed, her skirt riding up so high you can see her underwear. A group of guys see her, one of whom decides to take her home. Once there, he takes her to his room, starts to pull her panties down, when, all of a sudden, Cassandra sits up, stone cold sober, stares into the man’s eyes and says, “What are you doing?”
It turns out Cassandra is a faker. She pretends to be drunk at clubs to teach men a lesson about preying on wasted women. Even keeps count of every man she’s successfully conned in a diary she keeps under the bed. Outside of this, Cassandra lives a joyless life. She comes into work late every day, lies to her parents to keep them from questioning her, and glares at any man who even considers smiling in her direction.
That’s until Chris shows up. Chris was her classmate back in med school. He’s shocked to see Cassandra, and instantly flirts with her, somehow convincing her to go out with him. When Chris starts reminiscing about school, we learn why Cassandra does what she does. Back then, a friend in their group, Nina, was sexually assaulted by another mutual friend of theirs, Al. Nina reported it, but nobody in their group or at the college believed her. She eventually dropped out and committed suicide.
Chris was only a periphery friend so he only barely remembers the incident. However, this reminder lights a fire under Cassandra, who begins a “project” to enact revenge on everyone involved. First she lures the now-married friend who most vocally didn’t believe Nina into a hotel room with a predatory man. She kidnaps the daughter of the school administrator who didn’t believe Nina and places her in a room full of drunk frat boys. She even shows up to the rapist’s bachelor party for a final get-even play.
Poor Chris has no idea any of this is going on. But when shocking new evidence emerges that peripherally ties him to that fateful night, he must figure out a way to cut ties with Cassandra and keep his career in tact. Because Cassandra is her own worst enemy, he just might pull it off. Of course, never underestimate Cassandra (MAJOR SPOILER). Even in the afterlife, she’s savage.
Okay so now that I’ve read the script, it’s obvious why it made the Black List. It pushes 2018’s most pronounced narrative – that all men are evil rapists. For this reason, I was so ready to bail. There was only problem. The writing was really good. And the more I resisted, the more I got pulled in.
The script’s biggest strength is its main character, Cassandra. One of the harder things to do in screenwriting is create complex characters. Unlike books, you can’t get inside a character’s head and hear why they’re doing the things they do. Instead, you must convey who they are through action. And if their actions are contradictory (one second they’re an asshole and the next they’re sweet), the character comes off as confused. To avoid this, most movie characters are on the nose. Captain America is the embodiment of selflessness. John Wick really wants revenge. John Krasinski lives solely to protect his children.
In contrast, Cassandra is really complicated. Here’s a girl who quit med school to work at a coffee shop, who still lives at home at 30, and who goes out every night pretending to be drunk to teach predatory men that they’re assholes. Watching her do something as simple as go on a date is fascinating. Will she open her heart and have a good time or will she crack, spewing all her demons out at her unsuspecting foe? The big reason why you have to keep reading Promising Young Woman is to figure out who this girl is.
Yesterday, one of my big criticisms was that we didn’t get to meet the daughter who was the motivation for our hero’s journey. How can we care if we never connect with that person ourselves, I argued. Today’s script reminded me that the real problem with that script was that it sucked. And when you’re a bad writer writing bad screenplays, every choice is wrong.
We never meet Nina in this script yet I was captivated by Cassandra’s journey. And that’s because Cassandra herself was such a great character. And it’s because you never knew where the script was going next – the complete opposite of yesterday, where you might as well have tacked the climax onto the first act because we all knew it would happen. I didn’t know Nina was going to wait outside a high school and lure a teenager into her car under false pretenses and then threaten her mom with her safety later. And don’t get me started on the ending. I definitely didn’t see that coming.
Another great thing about this script is that Fennel never lets one side take over. This is a mistake lots of writers make. They don’t show the other side of the argument. Fennel gives us plenty of scenes where we ask, is this right? What happened to Nina was terrible but is this the best way to handle it? Is Cassandra justified, or is she a full-on nutcase? If Fennel only played to one side of the narrative (all women are perfect, all men are awful), it would’ve been boring.
Everybody should read this script. It’s a great example of how to keep the reader’s attention. At the very least, read the first 10 pages because I’m going to be referencing them tomorrow in the First 10 Pages Article. Finally! A genuine spec script – not a biopic or adaptation or period piece – that’s actually good. This is what the Black List used to be known for!
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Mix up the alphabet. You don’t always have to be logical (First comes A, then comes B, then comes C). You can play around with the order. In an early scene, Chris comes into the coffee shop and has a meet-cute with Cassandra. There’s clearly electricity between the two. At the end of the scene, Chris asks her out. We hold on Cassandra. She likes him. Cut to later that night, her putting make-up on, getting ready for the date. But we…. CUT TO THE CLUB, Cassandra pretending to be sloshed in the corner. Noooo… she’s opted for yet another night out. A few scenes later, Chris comes in again and they eventually go out. But, as you can see, it doesn’t happen in this perfect logical progression. Instead of A then B then C, you can do A then C then B. This helps keep the narrative unpredictable, lest you slip into Inevitability Syndrome.
