Remember, TODAY (THURSDAY) IS THE DEADLINE FOR PILOT SHOWDOWN! Do you have a pilot to submit to the contest? Best five loglines will be featured on the site and you guys will vote for the winner, which gets a review next week.
Here’s how to enter!
What: Pilot Showdown
I need your: Title, Genre, and Logline
Optional: Crossover Pitch, Tagline
Competition Date: Friday, June 21st
Deadline: Thursday, June 20th, 10pm Pacific Time
Where: Send your submissions to carsonreeves3@gmail.com
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Okay, onto our screenplay rewrite! If you’re new to the site, we’ve spent all year writing a script. We’ve since moved on to the rewrite process. We are in the sixth and final week of rewriting our SECOND DRAFT. Below, you can jump to every post that led us here.
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
Week 20 – Rewrite Week 3
Week 21 – Rewrite Week 4
Week 22 – Rewrite Week 5
On this sixth and final week of our 2nd draft rewrite, I want to remind you what’s important about your rewrite and what’s not important. Because what I’m learning from you guys is that you place the majority of your focus on parts of the rewrite that don’t matter all that much.
The reason for this is probably that rewriting is one of the most nebulous parts of the craft. It contains the least amount of clarity as far as what to do.
The other day I was helping a writer prepare for a second draft and we went through all the problems and talked through all the solutions and I thought we were good to go. I said, “Aim for 4 pages a day and you’ll be done in a month.”
But he said, “Hold on. I’m not writing from scratch. I’m going to be rewriting certain characters. I’m going to be changing scenes. I’m going to add mythology and detail. Don’t I need a different metric than ‘pages per day?’
I thought, ‘you know what, he’s right.’ Cause if you have to reimagine your main character – changing his tone from passive to active, changing his flaw from arrogant to obsessive – that’s a nuanced rewrite that doesn’t cater to the “pages per day” metric.
That’s why rewriting always feels messy. It’s not like painting a house.
It’s like painting a house, and planting a garden, and setting up a monthly spending budget, and keeping your marriage fresh, and fixing your car, and saving money for your kids’ college. It requires all of these unique skills to get to the finish line.
So, since we’re running out of time, I just want to remind everyone what’s most important in a rewrite. If you get just two things right, you can end up with a great draft.
Don’t get caught up in unimportant minutia that doesn’t affect the overall reading experience.
I know we all want that great dialogue but you shouldn’t be spending 4 hours on making the dialogue perfect in a two-page scene that’s mostly exposition. You’re wasting time doing that. Nobody reads a script and says, “You know, I really liked your script but some of your exposition was weak so I have to pass.”
Ditto description. It’s not that description isn’t important. But if you’re writing, say, a comedy, and you’re obsessing over describing your main character’s bedroom perfectly? That’s not why somebody reads a comedy script. They don’t read it for the excellent description of each and every location.
So that’s wasted time. Especially because over the course of the (minimum) 5 rewrites you’re going to need to get your script into shape, that scene that you spent all weekend perfecting might be cut later because that subplot wasn’t working.
Save all your dotting of the I’s and crossing of the T’s for your polish, which we’re getting to soon. But, at this stage, you’re rewriting. And when you rewrite, you want to get two things right above all else.
The first is the characters.
You want to make sure your main characters are clear. We understand…
a) their defining character trait
b) what they want
c) what their primary flaw is
d) and they must have some personality.
The reason most scripts fail is because characters are unclear, bland, or both. If, however, you nail your characters, it hides ALMOST ALL THE OTHER PROBLEMS IN YOUR SCRIPT. Cause we readers LOVE hanging out with characters we like or find interesting. And we don’t really care if the plot those great characters take us on is perfect.
Baby Reindeer has a wonky-as-hell plot. It jumps all over the place. The goals keep resetting. Martha leaves the story for large chunks at a time. But none of that matters because the two main characters are so compelling.
Almost as important as your main characters is your main character relationships. It is SPECIFICALLY the unresolved-ness of the primary relationship in your story that makes the reader want to turn the page. If two people are in love and they’re happy and they’ve got no problems, why do I need to turn the page? Their lives are set.
It’s only when relationships have that unresolved nature that we want to keep reading. Readers and viewers inherently want to hang around until something is resolved. So make sure that’s there in your primary relationships.
The second MUST-HAVE in a script is that you must deliver on what your concept promised. Or, another way to put it is: You gotta give’em what they came for.
So, if you’re writing a movie like Bad Boys, you better give us 4 inventive funny-as-hell set pieces. If you’re writing a movie like The Hangover, you better give us at least three hilarious characters. If you’re writing a movie like Inside Out, you better give us some really clever and funny explorations of emotions. If you’re writing Mad Max, you better give me some road-warrior car chases that we’ll never forget.
There are a lot of things you can do in rewrites that are going to improve your script. You can cut scenes that aren’t needed. You can combine characters so the story’s more streamlined. You can set up your hero’s objective more clearly. You can remind the reader of the stakes throughout the story. You can try to come up with more imaginative scene locations so all your scenes don’t take place in apartments, coffee shops, and work cubicles.
But none of those compare to:
- Getting the characters right.
- Delivering on the premise you promised.
So, let that be your guiding light if you feel lost during your rewrite. If you’re focusing on all this little stuff – STOP. We’ll get to the tweaking in the polish. But now, you just want the stuff that matters to be as good as possible.
