Yesterday, in response to the Nicholl-winning script, Numbers and Words, coupled with a larger discussion about Nicholl’s propensity to reward scripts with strong social messages, long-time thoughtful contributor Scott Serradell said this in the comment section:

I’m a little funny about the whole goings-on with Nicholl. I just question their legitimacy a bit if writers — knowing what advances in the Nicholl ranks — can then tune their stories to hit the right marks. Is that just tailoring? Or a polite form of trolling?

Well, let’s find out: My next script (and Nicholl entry) is titled “The Only Gay Bar in Gaza” — and it’s basically the brief (but beautiful) tragic romance between an Israeli man and a Palestinian man. Right there, I think I’ve got about 3 or 4 “message” boxes checked off. If I add a “based on a true story” it might just work!

I replied to Scott by saying if he really wrote that script and entered it into the Nicholl, I could guarantee, based on the concept alone, that it would make the semi-finals. If the execution was better-than-average, there’s a good chance it would be a finalist. Scott responded with,

But something about that ignites my cynicism. I mean, that little pitch above took all of 5 minutes to conjure up. And it certainly wasn’t because it was some personal story burning to get out; I merely took an assessment of what attributes the judges might be looking for and tailored (or trolled) my response accordingly. Is it right? Is that ethical? Well, if those are the rules of the game, does any of that matter? — If the broader goal is to get recognized by the industry, am I not obliged to do whatever it takes to set myself outside the pack?

That got me thinking. Not about the Nicholl. But about what happens when you remove yourself from the equation and generate ideas solely based on what you think the gatekeeper will respond to. Are you then better equipped to come up with successful ideas, similar to what Scott was able to do in this circumstance? The crippling x-factor in a screenwriter’s pursuit of writing a breakthrough script is the personal attachment he or she has to the idea. Writers often become fixated on commercially inert concepts simply because they’re obsessed with an aspect of the idea that they have a personal connection with.

This is true of every writer. Even professionals. How many ideas do you have on your computer that you love despite nobody else giving a damn? The reason for that is we have an intense connection to either the character, the concept, or the theme, that clouds our ability to judge the concept objectively. So today I’m asking, what if you removed the variable that’s clouding your judgement? What if you tried to come up with ideas that you, yourself, would never write, but you’re positive would make billions of dollars at the box office? Do you become a better idea-generator under those circumstances?

To see if this is the case, apply the same logic to Hollywood that Scott did with Nicholl. What does Hollywood like? The people who visit this site know the answer to this question better than anybody. They like superheroes. They like giant monsters (King Kong, Robots, Godzilla, sharks). They like horror. They like a guy with a gun. They really like a girl with a gun. Time-travel. Serial killers. Aliens. They like two-handers, especially action-comedy. They like biopics about people who led fascinating lives. They like true stories that involve heroism. They like the apocalypse. They like heists. They like irony.

Today’s post is more of an experiment than anything. Maybe my theory is wrong. But I’m curious to see what you guys would pitch if you had zero vested interest in your idea, and were only pitching what you were convinced Hollywood would go bonkers over. Is it as simple as saying, “A biopic about Horace Smith and Daniel B. Wesson, the founders of Smith and Wesson? Here’s my routing number. Transfer the 5 mil by Friday, thanks.” Or “A female FBI agent is tasked with putting together a team to take down the biggest crime organization in the city, which happens to be led by her father (or mother).”

Remove yourself from the equation and pitch your surefire Hollywood hits in the comments. Upvote any pitches you like. Let’s prove or disprove my theory by the end of the day.

Our first look at one of the 2018 Nicholl Winners!

Genre: Drama
Premise: A gifted young black mathematician’s life is thrown into disarray after a terrible accident sends him to prison.
About: Today’s script was one of the four WINNERS of the 2018 Nicholl Contest, the most popular of all the screenwriting contests.
Writer: Grace Sherman
Details: 117 pages

What’s the only thing that gets screenwriters talking more than a two-page preface proclaiming one’s awesomeness and that all men are evil? A Nicholl winning script, that’s what! This one came recommended to me by commenter, Da Choppa. I find that he and I see eye-to-eye on a lot of screenplays, so I was excited to check it out.

I have a love-hate relationship with Nicholl. I feel that they prioritize a script’s message over its storytelling, whereas for me it’s the opposite. With that said, they usually find a few talented writers every year, so it’s worth checking out who won.

15 year-old DeMarcus Daniels lives in the ghetto with his mother, who’s dating a no-good dickhead loser, Nate. DeMarcus doesn’t plan to be living this life for long, though. He’s a borderline genius when it comes to mathematics, and his goal is to solve the most difficult math problem ever created, The 500 year-old Pythenian Hypothesis.

DeMarcus is one of two kids from his neighborhood who commute to a rich white school in the suburbs. The other is 12 year-old child prodigy, Beth, a bookworm who’s constantly pushing DeMarcus to read more. DeMarcus considers this Harry Potter dork an annoyance, and mostly keeps her at arm’s length.

One day, at home, DeMarcus gets into an anything-goes fight with Nate that ends with DeMarcus bashing him with a bat. Nate is able to grab DeMarcus’s mother at the last second, throwing her in between them, resulting in DeMarcus bashing in the head of and accidentally killing his mother.

DeMarcus then goes to prison for 26 years, where he loses all hope in humanity. His only friend at prison is Clint, a college kid who use to pay him to do math problems, who also got thrown into prison for a drunk-driving accident that crippled his girlfriend. After DeMarcus finally gets out at 41 years old, Clint (who got released a long time ago) helps him reintegrate into society.

DeMarcus only cares about one thing these days – finding and killing Nate. But when he runs into Beth again, recently divorced from her husband, their friendship slowly helps chip away at the hard shell he built up during prison. Beth encourages DeMarcus to get back into math – maybe even solve that unsolvable theorem he always talked about. But DeMarcus claims to be too far gone for that. In fact, DeMarcus only has one goal left on this planet, and that’s getting even with the man that killed his mother.

Well, this is definitely a Nicholl script, that’s for sure.

As I’ve told you guys plenty of times before, this is the kind material the Nicholl responds very positively to. They’re receptive to stories led by minorities and anything that has a strong social message about the world. Especially right now. So I can see why this won.

But as you also know, all I care about when I read a script is: Is the story good? And, unfortunately, with Numbers and Words, that question is hard to answer. It’s been awhile since I’ve read a script this ambitious, this frustrating. I was so on board with the first ten pages. I liked the friendship built up between DeMarcus and Beth, the way he pushed her away and yet was the first to stand up for her if she got in trouble. I loved the math equation stuff. There’s always something mystical about an unsolvable equation, which is probably the same reason Good Will Hunting is one of my favorite movies.

But the script takes a giant left turn at the end of the first act that was so shocking, I’m not sure I ever recovered from it. That would be when DeMarcus accidentally kills his mother. There were a couple of issues with this. First of all, it felt contrived. I just didn’t believe that it would happen. I would’ve preferred if he had killed Nate, to be honest. I would’ve bought that in a second.

But it was more the after effect of that choice. It turned the story into something completely different than what I thought it was going to be about. All of a sudden, we’re in prison for 40 pages and it’s like, “Oh, it’s one those movies?” That was not an easy transition to make.

Also, every 15 pages, right when the story had me again, something would happen to pull me back out. For example, what are the chances that the 19 year old privileged white rich kid who pays you to do his math homework ends up in the same prison you’re in? That was hard to buy into. Later still in the prison section, a program is implemented where college kids come in to tutor inmates. And guess who, coincidentally, happens to be one of these college kids? Beth. All grown up.

Despite this, I was still invested in DeMarcus’s journey. Yeah, it was too melodramatic at times. But you wanted this guy to overcome the conflict within himself. And, most of the time, that’s all you need to make a script work. You establish a compelling character, you introduce something broken inside of them, and the audience sticks around to see if that character can be fixed. This works because we all have something broken inside of us. And there’s some psychological trickery whereby we believe that if this fictional character can be fixed, then we can be fixed as well.

And I have to give it to Sherman. The level of difficulty in any theme-heavy script that traverses an extended passage of time is in the 8 out of 10 range. Movies are not good at conveying the passage of time. Books are. Which is funny because while I was reading this, I kept thinking that it would work better as a novel. As it stands, it’s a flawed but intriguing story. And the Nicholl has always said that they’re more interested in finding good writers than good scripts. By that logic, they’ve done a good job. Sherman is talented. Also, this is a GREAT example of the kind of material you should be sending to Nicholl if you want to advance far. If you plan on entering the contest in the future, it’s worth reading Numbers and Words just for that.

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

What I learned: Make sure to add low-key goals to “living life” stories. A “living life” story is any movie where the focus is more on the characters living their lives (Ladybird being a recent example) than a clear focused plot (Ocean’s 8 being a recent example). A neat trick you can use to add some low-key narrative thrust to these scripts is to pepper in some softer goals. There are two of these in Numbers and Words. The first is The Pythenian Hypothesis. We want to see DeMarcus solve that. The second is when he’s released from jail. He wants to kill Nate. Again, these aren’t big overarching plot goals. But they’re strong enough to keep the story focused. Without them, some readers may not be sure what they’re sticking around for.

Genre: TV Show – Hitchcockian Thriller
Premise: A secret military program in Florida prepares soldiers coming back from the war to effectively integrate back into society.
About: Homecoming started off as a podcast and gained a lot of publicity at the time as it was the first podcast that had attracted big name talent to the medium (Catherine Keener, David Schwimmer, and Oscar Isaac were featured players on the show). Universal would later secure the rights for TV. From there, Sam Esmail (of Mr. Robot fame) came on to run the show, and Julia Roberts signed on to be the featured star. Amazon debuted the show this weekend. The original creators of the podcast, Eli Horowitz and Micah Bloomberg, did much of the writing for the TV version as well.
Writers: Micah Bloomberg & Eli Horowitz
Details: 10 roughly 30 minute episodes

I’m a HUGE fan of Sam Esmail. I’ve been reading his scripts long before he became one of the hottest names in town (as the creator of Mr. Robot). If you’re ever frustrated about whether you’re going to “make it” or not, I saw this guy spec out script after script for a good 7 years. Everybody thought he was talented, but they all felt his scripts were too voice-y or weird to get made. TV turned out to be the perfect arena for him as it allowed him to play with his weird sensibilities without having to wrap all the weirdness up in one go. So I’ve been looking forward to this as soon as I saw the trailer. I mean, the only other person who’s gotten Julia Roberts to do TV in 30 years was her ex-husband. So you knew this was heavyweight material. Or, at least, that was the assumption. Is it heavyweight material? Let’s find out.

Heidi Bergman has been brought in as a psychotherapist in a new military program that helps soldiers returning from the war. Her job is pretty simple. She sits down with each of the soldiers throughout the week and listens to their stories about the war. Her main patient is a gentle African-American man named Walter Cruz. Cruz seems to be the opposite of what you’d expect a soldier to be after returning from a war. He’s kind, he’s sweet, he’s funny. Heidi enjoys her sessions with him.

Meanwhile, Cruz’s closest friend in the unit, Abel, thinks this whole program is sketchy. They’re being kept in this mysterious building. There’s no one else around for miles. They’ve been told they’re in Florida, but he points out that they have no direct evidence that that’s the case. He goes so far as to say they’re still in the Middle East and that the U.S. created this fake facility to trick them. Cruz thinks his friend is going loco. But in the back of his head, he wonders if there’s some truth to the theory.

Occasionally, we jump forward several years, where Heidi is now working as a waitress at a dingy marina diner. It’s there where a strange investigator, Thomas Carrasco, approaches her, wanting to know about the failed program, dubbed, “Homecoming.” But Heidi’s moved on from that world and tells Carrasco as much. She doesn’t remember much and labels the entire program uneventful. Carrasco’s bosses likewise tell him to give up. But just as he’s going to close the file, he decides to dig deeper. He’s convinced that something nefarious is at the bottom of the Homecoming file.

The problem with Homecoming is its lack of a hook. It wants you to think it has a hook. A mysterious program that helped military veterans which has since been abandoned. But the program itself isn’t that interesting. The pilot tries to tempt us by implying these men have a high proclivity towards violence. One of the scenes attempts to prepare the men for the real world by staging a mock job interview. During the interview, one of the vets loses his shit and starts fighting another soldier. It’s supposed to be a highlight scene and yet the only thing I could think afterwards was, “So you’re saying military vets have PTSD and a proclivity towards violence? Wow. Cutting edge theory you’ve put together there.”

The moment I suspected this show was in trouble was the last scene of the pilot. Remember, the final scene in a pilot must work double duty. It has to wrap up the pilot, but also introduce a cliffhanger to make us want to watch the next episode. Homecoming’s final scene takes place 3 years after the program. Heidi now works as a waitress in a diner. The investigator pulls her outside to ask her what she remembers about the program. The scene is positioned as if some giant bomb is going to be dropped at any moment. He’s probing what she remembers. She tells him it was just a job. Finally, there’s a dramatic pause, and he asks, “Do you remember William Cruz?” William Cruz is the soldier she spent the most time with. Another dramatic pause. And then she replies, simply, “No.”

And that’s the end of the pilot. That’s our big wowza cliffhanger: Heidi denying that she remembers William Cruz.

I’m sorry, but, that doesn’t get me back in the door. You need something WAY BIGGER. You need an exchange closer to… HEIDI: “I’ve already told you. I don’t remember much.” INVESTIGATOR: “Anything will help. Anything at all. Walter Cruz. Do you remember him?” HEIDI: “Why are you even asking me this? I’ve moved on.” INVESTIGATOR: “Because every soldier in the Homecoming Program… is now dead.” He stares at her, gauging her reaction. We can see she’s shocked by this but trying to hide it. “I’m sorry, I have to get back to work.” And then she goes inside.

Look, I’m not saying that’s the greatest cliffhanger ever. But at least NOW YOU HAVE A SHOW. Now I want to know what happened to these guys. Now I want to know what this mysterious program is about. And the only way I can find answers to these two questions is to keep watching. Why would I want to keep watching a show just because Julia Roberts lied about remembering one of the soldiers?

Also, the podcast format doesn’t adapt nicely to television. Or, I should say, they didn’t figure out how to adapt it to television. Obviously, a podcast is going to have a lot of talking. It needs to fill up the dead air. But TV is a visual medium. It works better when it’s showing, not telling. And to Esmail’s credit he does some cool things visually. There’s one shot early on that follows Roberts through the entire facility from above.

But there are just as many problematic moments, such as Heidi’s silly boss who calls her all the time and babbles on endlessly without ever really saying anything. I’m sure in the podcast format, this non-stop babble worked well, since it killed a lot of minutes. But watching it becomes tiring, particularly since, like I said, he’s not saying anything. He’s just filling up space with words. It wasn’t until the fifth boss-phone monologue, in the third episode, that he actually introduced a plot point, which was that they were secretly administering medication to the soldiers in their meals. Your ratio of talking to plot points shouldn’t be 1000 to 1.

I remain unconvinced that creators know what to do with the new streaming format. Are they treating it like TV? Are they treating it like movies? Because if you’re treating it like one long movie, then sure, you don’t need a big cliffhanger at the end of the pilot episode. But I’d argue that any situation whereby you leave it up to the watcher to find and click the next episode means that if you didn’t hook them, they won’t click. In other words, traditional TV rules still apply.

With all of that said, I don’t think Homecoming is a failure. It’s certainly more interesting than most of what you’ll find on TV. The score is weird. It has its share of fun visual gags (my favorite was an old warehouse with an antiquated/futuristic motion detector, so that the dusty old lamps light up and turn off one at a time as you walk through the building – BZZZZ-POP, BZZZZ-POP). Esmail loves top play around with the camera. And Roberts is always hard to look away from. I guess I wanted this to be great. And I was disappointed that it didn’t live up to those expectations. But you could certainly do worse.

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

What I learned: Never write scenes because you need to fill up time. Write them because they are necessary to move the plot along. This boss character who calls Heidi all the time – 95% of what he says is absolutely meaningless. He’s just there to be the babbling boss who eats up minutes. Audiences get bored quickly. Don’t make it easy for them.

Don’t do it don’t do it don’t do it don’t do it. These are the words that have been assaulting my brain every hour for the last seven days. That would be when Red Dead Redemption 2 came out. Since then, I’ve gone to Amazon.com every hour on the hour and stared at a sleek picture of a brand new Playstation 4. Don’t do it don’t do it don’t do it don’t do it. I’ve wanted a Playstation 4 forever. But I’ve specifically not purchased one because I know I’ll waste hours of time with it. That plan has worked up until seven days ago. But every time I see a commercial for that rootin-tootin freakin video game, I want to buy it. I want to roll in its digital dirt. I want to swim in its plethora of pixels. So far I’ve held off. But I don’t know how much longer I can last.

Luckily, I found a Western for this week’s amateur offerings. That’s helped some. As for the rest of the scripts, we’ve got an electric variety. Pilots. Comedies. Thrillers. Oh, and one of these “Why You Should Reads” is quite inspirational. A lesson in assertiveness and exploring every contact you’ve got, no matter how small it seems. Check it out!

If you’ve never played Amateur Offerings before, you’ve been deducted 4 Scriptshadow points. A vote from you could mean the difference between a screenwriter starting his career and spending the rest of it in obscurity. Read as much of each screenplay as you can. Afterwards, cast your vote for your favorite script in the comments section. Voting closes on Sunday night, 11:59pm Pacific Time. Winner gets a review next Friday. — If you’d like to submit your own script to compete in Amateur Offerings, send a PDF of your script to carsonreeves3@gmail.com with the title, genre, logline, and why you think your script should get a shot.

Good luck to all!

Title: Bricks of Glory
Genre: Sports Comedy
Logline: In the fast-rising sport of Bricklaying, an anti-doping agent and disgraced former champion must take down the champion’s former nemesis, who they suspect is using a bricklaying-enhancement drug known as “Brick Dust.”
Why You Should Read: Bricks of Glory was inspired by a real life event called the Bricklayer 500 which takes place in Vegas every year. They take the top 20 bricklayers from around the world and compete to see who can build the highest (and most structurally sound) brick wall in 60 minutes. A friend of mine’s husband won the Regional Competition in my area so I went to Vegas to watch the show and attended the World of Concrete convention as research. Man, what a trip. I mean they seriously treat this like a major sporting event! I find it so hilarious! So in my script, I completely exaggerate this and make it a much bigger, funnier, spectacle of a sport. Bricklayers use flair, like lighting their walls on fire and juggling bricks, and the competition is so fierce, they resort to taking performance enhancing drugs. I’ve put a lot of work into this script, even doing table reads with stand up comedians to help me punch up the jokes. But if you want to see what inspired it, here’s a video recap of the Bricklayer 500 which should sell it better than I ever could: https://youtu.be/zR69ZFdldH0

Title: The Boom
Genre: TV – One Hour Drama
Series Logline: In the early 2000s, dreamers, misfits, prodigies, and hustlers swarm to Las Vegas in search of fame and fortune during the birth of the poker boom.
Pilot Logline: After becoming an online poker sensation, a gambling addict goes to Vegas to try his hand at the real thing, meanwhile a tortured ex-gangbanger kidnaps his cousin, a sports-betting prodigy, and drives him to the same casino hoping to capitalize on his skills.
Why You Should Read: In 2003, an amateur poker player named Chris Moneymaker won the World Series of Poker, sparking a massive increase in poker play all over the world. College students became millionaires playing online poker and moved to Las Vegas to live it up, while the existing live pros became celebrities. The Boom seeks to leverage the unique stories and characters from this time period to create the first ever series which chronicles the lives of professional gamblers in Las Vegas. It’s an ensemble similar to The Wire in that it follows a wide variety of characters and not all of them cross paths. The pilot starts with an 11 page prologue that culminates with the event that launches the series and from then on follows two separate storylines featuring four main characters, all struggling to survive in Las Vegas at the start of the poker boom. One of the things I’m most proud of with this pilot is that non-gamblers have found it accessible—so if you don’t know a thing about poker, please don’t let it prevent you from reading!

Title: Legal Pursuit
Genre: Comedy
Logline: A mocumentary following the legal exploits of the personal injury law firm Fraud, Trick & Brown and their pursuit of fortune, fame and sometimes justice.
Why You Should Read: In America today if you accidentally nail your hand to a wall because of a faulty nail gun, you’ll want to sue the nail gun manufacturer and there are plenty of lawyers that’ll nip at your heels for the case. However, if your teenager went to the hospital for eating a Tide Pod and you want to sue the detergent company for a lack of warning not to eat it, who are you going to call? You’re going to need a more ethically flexible attorney willing to blame someone else for you.

Legal dramas tackle social injustices, changing times, and debates about what real justice is and how the law should work. Legal Pursuit is a half-hour single camera comedy that shows how the legal system sadly works and follows the attorneys of Fraud(pronounced Freud), Trick and Brown. The lawyers that’ll lie, cheat and manipulate everyone they can to defend you in court and split the settlement 70/30… 60/40… Fine: 40/60!

Desperate for business in this bad economy, each client is a potential win that will keep the lights on for one more week, get them that fancy electric car, pay off their new boat or afford them a vacation to Hawaii. Oh! Legal fees, surprise witnesses and experts need to be covered too! Enjoy! And if you don’t, I’d love to hear thoughts from the SS community to help make this the best it can be.

Title: THE SHADOWED
Genre: Horror-Western
Logline: An outlaw and his gang must team-up with a company of Texas Rangers to battle with the resurrected ghosts of vengeful Navajo braves besieging an isolated border town.
Why You Should Read: My script was shortlisted in The Tracking Board’s Launch Pad competition, allowing me to become a TB Alumni. I wrote the script after chatting with stuntman Ian Van Temperley, who hoped to be able to do the horse stunts for The Shadowed if it ever went into production. Whilst doing the stunts for the TV series Galavant, Ian Van Temperley shared my Shadowed script with the show’s creator Dan Fogleman. Dan read the script and wrote back saying this: “Dan Fogelman here from Galavant. I wanted to let you know that I read your script and was very impressed! The best thing about the script was the outlaw character Wakes, along with how well your action sequences were not only crafted, but written. It’s a very hard thing to do well, and you clearly know how to describe them. Most action sequences get hard to follow and hard to “read” – that’s not at all the case here. You have a great main character and a terrific action movie here. I enjoyed reading it.”

Title: Endangered 6
Genre: Thriller
Logline: After a widowed U.S. war vet and his estranged daughter check into a Manhattan hotel to reconnect, they soon find themselves alone and trapped in the building only to discover they’re at the center of a terrorist conspiracy that will kill hundreds on the streets of Manhattan, but they’re the only ones who know… or have the power to stop it.
Why You Should Read: I’ve been honing my craft for a while and have a few specs on the hard drive to show for it. This one was a finalist last year in a thriller screenplay contest and I’d like to see how it might do here with the Scriptshadow crowd. When I set out to write this my goal was to write a fast paced thriller with a broken relationship between a father and daughter at its emotional core. It’s Panic Room on steroids. Hope you feel the rush too!

Here are 10 lessons born out of the mistakes I’ve seen in the last 10 scripts I consulted on.

TAKE AT LEAST ONE BIG CHANCE – The most common script I read is the by-the-book script. It’s set in a familiar genre – horror, thriller, western – and it stays very comfortably within the rules of that genre. It never strives to do anything unique. There’s a fear of coloring outside the lines. These scripts can be decent. But they can never be great. Take one big chance. We know how I felt about Hereditary, but they definitely took a huge chance (spoiler) by killing off the daughter the way they did in that film. And people in The Matrix only fight via… Kung-Fu? I don’t think the average writer realizes how big of a risk that choice was.

PUT SOME BAD IN YOUR GOOD CHARACTERS AND SOME GOOD IN YOUR BAD CHARACTERS – When you hear the words, “on the nose,” in reference to one of your characters, you know you’ve failed. Here’s how to prevent that. For your heroes, give them shades of darkness. And for your villains, give them shades of goodness. “Good” character in The Looming Tower, Jeff Daniels, was determined to rip through red tape to take out terrorists and protect America. In the meantime, he was sleeping with several women besides his wife. That’s how you write a complex character.

FIGURE OUT A WAY TO MAKE YOUR HERO ACTIVE – One of the hardest things for a script to overcome is a passive hero. Audiences don’t like passive people. Active people drive stories. So whatever you can do to make your hero active, do it. I just read a military script where the main character was a soldier. And throughout the story, he was passively doing as told. Technically, this makes sense. Soldiers have to follow orders. But it doesn’t work for the story cause the hero is forced into the background. Chris Kyle was a soldier in American Sniper. But I’d never call him passive. Figure something out so that your hero is active. Cause it’s too hard to make a script work otherwise.

DON’T BE AFRAID TO CHANGE THE GOAL DURING THE SCRIPT – Movies can become boring if we know the goal from the first page to the last. There’s ways around this (namely, writing great characters). But if you want to hack the problem, change the hero’s goal at some point during the story. This keeps the reader on their toes, as it keeps the story fresh. For example, Star Wars starts out with the goal of delivering R2-D2 to Princess Leia’s home planet. But later, the goal switches to destroying the Death Star.

LAZY FIRST SCENES – This one drives me nuts because it’s one of the first things they teach you when you get into screenwriting. Write a killer first scene. Hook the reader immediately. And yet, in 9 out of the last 10 consulting scripts I’ve read, the writer didn’t follow this advice. I’m not saying all the scenes were bad. Some were pretty good, actually. But only one gave me the impression that the writer understood just how important the first scene is. He really went for it. I would implore you to think of your first scene as its own separate screenplay. Because it basically is. It’s the resume that lets the employer know that you’re worth knowing more about. You should be treating your first scene like it’s a life or death scenario. If you don’t hook the reader, you die.

DON’T OVERREACH – Be realistic about what you’re capable of. One of the problems writers make is they pick a really complex script or really complex subject matter, and they either don’t have the chops to nail it yet, or they don’t want to do the research required to make something like that work. For example, if I came up with an awesome idea about black market Russian nuclear warhead sales during the Cold War, I would never write it in a million years because I know I would have to do so much research to make that story feel even remotely authentic. I literally know three words in Russian. I couldn’t point out Moscow on a map of Russia if you gave me five guesses. And I’m going to write an intricate story about nuclear espionage in Russia 40 years ago? Part of being a good screenwriter is understanding your limitations. Yes, you want to be pushing yourself. But don’t be unrealistic. The best scripts are often scripts where the writer is insanely comfortable in the genre and story they’re telling.

CLARITY ISSUES – Clarity should be a given. I should never be confused about how two people know each other, where we are, what’s going on in a scene, what the basic geography is. I find that the writers who have the biggest problems with clarity are the ones who don’t read a lot of scripts. Make sure you’re reading scripts! And read AMATEUR SCRIPTS too. That’s where you’ll be confused yourself. You’ll then be less likely to make those mistakes in your own script.

HALF-BAKED MYTHOLOGY – There’s a huge difference between extensively built mythology and half-baked mythology. Watch The Matrix. Then go watch Tom Cruise’s The Mummy. Notice how carefully woven together the mythology of The Matrix is. You know that there are zero holes. It’s been broken down then built back up a hundred times (the first film, not the sequels). The Mummy, meanwhile, is all over the place. Nothing really makes sense. We’re not quite sure what the rules are. So if you’re writing a fantasy or sci-fi or horror script, do the work on the mythology. If you half-ass it, believe me, the reader will know.

NOT ENOUGH CONFLICT IN SCENES – The scripts that I have to fight to stay awake during are the ones where there’s little conflict going on. There’s no major conflict between the characters. There’s not a lot of conflict in the dialogue. There’s not a lot of conflict in the plot. Things tend to go easily for the characters. They don’t have to overcome major obstacles. Or, if they do, the obstacles are easy to defeat. Look to add conflict in every single scene. Remember that the reader feels a need to keep reading as long as there’s something unresolved. So if there’s conflict (an unresolved issue) in every scene, there’s always a need to keep reading.

EXPLOIT YOUR CONCEPT – Whatever your concept is, exploit the hell out of it. That’s what’s unique about your script. So you shouldn’t be focusing on other stuff. Every ten scripts or so, I’ll read a script with a really high-concept premise, but it reads like every other script I’ve read, namely because the writer’s inserting generic copy scenes from similar movies as opposed to exploiting the premise. Watch the trailer for the new film “Isn’t It Romantic.” The idea is that a woman wakes up in a romantic comedy world. You can see here that every scene of the trailer highlights that. Whether you like the idea or not, you can’t deny that the writer is mining it for everything its got. That’s what you need to be doing with your idea.