Week 1 – Concept
Week 2 – Solidifying Your Concept
Week 3 – Building Your Characters
Week 4 – Outlining
Week 5 – The First 10 Pages
Week 6 – Inciting Incident
Week 7 – Turn Into 2nd Act
Week 8 – Fun and Games
Week 9 – Using Sequences to Tackle Your Second Act
Week 10 – The Midpoint
Week 11 – Chill Out or Ramp Up
Week 12 – Lead Up To the “Scene of Death”
Week 13 – Moment of Death
Week 14 – The Climax
Week 15 – The End!
Week 16 – Rewrite Prep 1
Week 17 – Rewrite Prep 2
Week 18 – Rewrite Week 1
Week 19 – Rewrite Week 2
One of the more frustrating things about rewriting, at least for me, is when you come up upon one of your big story problems and you don’t have a solution for it.
Because what often happens is you get so caught up in the fact that you don’t know how to solve the problem that you allow it to stop production. You feel that until you know how to solve that issue, what’s the point?
A big problem I always ran into in my screenwriting days was the ending. My endings always took the longest to figure out. They felt 5-6 drafts behind everything else in the story.
It drove me nuts cause I knew nothing mattered unless that ending brought it all together. And sometimes my endings would be so generic that I knew I needed to completely reimagine them.
Or sometimes it was a logistical problem. If I was writing a sci-fi thriller where the final act had my hero running through some high-tech underground facility, I would have to figure how he was able to do this considering he’d never been in this facility before and was just a normal guy.
Problems like that require you to do some deep searching. Is this believable that an average Joe would be able to run around a 5 billion dollar secret government facility and not get caught by anyone? Definitely not. So does this mean I need to rethink the character? Should I give him a military background so that performing these tasks makes more sense? But if I make him more of a military guy, doesn’t that change his entire character? He becomes more confident, more active, more assured. Turning him into that character changes the whole dynamic with his ex-wife as well, who I had leaving him because he was so passive. That situation changes now so I’ll have to come up with a different reason why they got divorced, as well as a different dynamic for their relationship.
Do you see how quickly these changes affect the story? That’s why problem-solving is so difficult. Any major change to your story is going to have repercussions and echoes throughout the rest of the story. You have to decide if those changes are worth it.
For a lot of writers, their solution to this is inactivity. It’s easier to do nothing than to do all those somethings. Cause “something” is going to change things and once things start changing, you’re afraid you can’t press rewind.
I get it. I’ve been there.
But writer’s block is not the path around these obstacles. So here’s what I suggest you do if you have these big problems in your script that you don’t know how to solve.
The easiest thing to do is to work on other problems – preferably smaller ones. There are always other things you can fix in your script. You want to keep fixing those things cause it’s going to keep you writing. And, what often happens, is that when you work on these other things, you get ideas on how to solve the tougher problems.
Another thing I like to do is have a book, or a script, that I’m reading concurrently with my rewrite. I suggest a book that’s in the same postal code as your script but not in the same ballpark.
So, if you’re writing Gone Girl, read something like Silence of the Lambs. Don’t read The Girl On The Train.
You don’t want to read something directly like your script because any ideas that you get from that story are going to feel like you’re copying that story. Whereas, when the book you read is in another genre, any ideas you get from it will feel original, since they’re not happening in the same type of story.
As you’re reading this book, have that big problem in your screenplay in the back of your mind. Always have it sitting there because sooner or later something’s going to happen in that book that makes you realize, “Ooh, I could do that. That’ll help solve my problem.”
To be honest, you should be doing that same thing in your everyday life. As you’re walking around, carry that problem along with you in your brain basket. You never know what you’re going to run into that will give you that lightbulb moment to solve the problem.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the second draft does not have to be Chinatown amazing. Some writers try to knock the second draft out of the park. I disagree with that approach because you’re still in a stage where you’re trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t work in your script.
All you have to do is be a little better than the last draft. Even if you only make a scene 5% better because you found a little dialogue exchange within it that was more clever, or funnier – that’s progress. Which is all you’re looking for. You want this draft to be better than the previous draft.
Finally, I want to remind you that there’s no such thing as writer’s block.
There is only fear.
Fear that you will write something sub-par. That’s the only reason you get “writer’s block.”
I’m not saying you should just write down anything even if you know it’s bad. But trust yourself that you understand your story a little better than you did when you started your first draft. And, like I said, use that knowledge to make the script 3% better in this area, and 5% better in that area. Keep making every variable a little bit better and you will have a superior second draft.
Once again, we are rewriting an average of 3 pages a day. We are writing 6 days a week. That means you are rewriting 18 pages a week.
After this week, you will be finished with 54 pages, which is halfway through your rewrite.
Use the comment section below to vent but also to provide support! Writing’s a lonely venture. We’re all here for each other.
Keep punching that carriage return. :)
