Week 0 (concept)
Week 1 (outline)
Week 2 (first act)
Week 3 (first half of second act)
Week 4 (second half second act)
Week 5 (third act)
Week 6 (Evaluate your first draft)
A PLAN OF ATTACK
This week, you will lay out a rewrite-targeted outline.
The key to any good rewrite is A PLAN OF ATTACK.
The more specific your plan of attack is, the more effective your rewrite will be.
Last week, I asked you to read your script and identify the five key areas where your script needed to improve. Common first draft problems include a slow plot, inconsistent characters, a large page count, a small page count, scenes that don’t push the story forward, abandoned subplots, setups without payoffs, payoffs without setups, generic characters, cliche choices, low stakes, and low urgency, to name a few.
Also, with comedies, there is such a strong desire to “write funny” that first drafts have a lot of comedy situations that have nothing to do with the story. You can get away with a couple of these if they’re ABSOLUTELY HILARIOUS (the zoo scene in Bad Trip comes to mind). But you definitely want your plot driving the characters’ actions.
When reading interviews for Borat 2, the director talked about this extremely funny scene between Borat and the barber. But the comedy was random and had nothing to do with the overall plot of the movie so they had to get rid of it. That should tell you something. If they’re not including funny bits from a Borat movie due to plot, you don’t get special privileges for your script.
One of the most common changes from first to second drafts is speeding up the plot.
What often happens in a first draft is you follow your funny bone more than you follow the plot. If you’re writing a comedy called “First Date” about a couple on their first date, you might get a funny idea 30 pages in to have the couple bump into the guy’s crazy ex-girlfriend, who freaks out when she sees him on a date with another girl and tries to beat her up. That unplanned scene could add five extra pages to the script.
You might get another idea later where they’re driving to the next destination and get mistaken for an Uber and have to take a pissed off married couple across town. This couple can’t stop complaining about how marriage sucks and it’s pointless to ever get in a relationship, seeding the idea that this first date is pointless to our heroes. That adds another five pages.
For this reason, you end up hitting all your major plot points late. This pushes EVERYTHING in your script back too far, which creates a slow-moving plot. Now to you it’s not slow. It never feels slow to the writer because the writer assumes that everything they write is amazing and is therefore riveting to read. But trust me. The reader is bored. So you have to move your plot points up in the second draft. In fact, I cannot tell you how many times I’ve seen someone take their “lowest point” break into the third act and move it up to the midpoint.
Comedies tend to be funnier when your characters are trying to accomplish things – when they’re moving forward to the next goal that gets them closer to achieving their ultimate objective.
This is why road trip comedies work so well. We can physically see our characters getting closer to their ultimate destination. But the point is, you should be evaluating all your major plot points and asking, “Can I move this up in the script?” The closer your plot points are together, the faster the script tends to read.
If you’re writing the First Date movie and the characters go 60 pages without any interruptions or major things getting in the way of their date (zero plot points), chances are the reader is bored. Keep the story moving. Keep the story moving. Keep the story moving.
THE REWRITE OUTLINE
Here’s what I want you to do.
I want you to open up a new document and at the top of the document, I want you to write the 3-10 most important OVERALL notes you want to implement in the rewrite. These are not page or scene specific, but rather stuff that will come up over and over again.
For example, an ‘overall’ note might be: “Make sure MAIN CHARACTER is more active!” In the last draft, he was passive or reactive. And this time around you want to make sure his eyes remain on the prize. You want him to be more involved in pushing the story forward. Another might be, “Add more obstacles!” In the previous draft, there weren’t nearly enough obstacles getting in the way of their date. You want to change that. Make the date even MORE difficult. (“MORE,” “BIGGER” and “FASTER” are common themes when trying to improve a script)
After you’ve done that, you’re going to split your outline into 8 SEQUENCES. SEQUENCE 1 is pages 1-12. SEQUENCE 2 is 13-25. SEQUENCE 3 is 26-38. SEQUENCE 4 is 39-50. SEQUENCE 5 is 51-62. SEQUENCE 6 is 63-75. SEQUENCE 7 is 76-88. SEQUENCE 8 is 89-100.
If you want to write a 110 page comedy, add 1 page to each sequence.
What we’re trying to do here is take that big unruly mess of a vomit draft and shape it into something more focused. I find it’s helpful to name each sequence so that it has a theme. And then, underneath that, write down all of your notes for what you’re trying to achieve in that sequence. It’s up to you how specific you want to get. You can construct big hierarchal mini-outlines under each paragraph or just write a few sentences for what you’re trying to achieve.
Here’s how this might look for our fictional script, “FIRST DATE”
SEQUENCE 1 (PAGES 1-12) – “MISCOMMUNICATION”
– Let’s intercut back and forth to both of them getting ready instead of showing her entire routine then his entire routine.
– Might be funny to play with expectations here. Doug should be the one who takes forever and Claire is the one who’s ready in five minutes.
– Get rid of Doug’s annoying roommate. Wasn’t funny.
– Better establish that Doug is broke.
– This time, when Doug gets to the restaurant and calls Claire to see where she is, don’t have Claire be so angry. The anger from both sides needs to build over the course of the night. If we start Claire at an 11, we have nowhere to go with her. So Claire will be more jokey about it. “Didn’t you forget something?” “What?” “That in order to have a date, you need to pick the date up?”
– It will be an ongoing debate throughout the night on whether they agreed to meet at the restaurant or Doug was supposed to pick her up.
SEQUENCE 2 (PAGES 13-25) – “RUNS OUT OF GAS”
– Instead of Doug running out of gas in a sketchy part of town, which has been done before, have him run out of gas on the freeway and get stuck on the left shoulder, where it’s impossible to escape.
– When he calls Claire and lies about where he is, we should keep hearing her ex in the background. Remember, in this draft, she’s still living with her ex, who Doug thinks is still in love with her. So we have to keep that thread present.
– He’ll get a call from the AAA truck when it’s close that they have to cancel cause they ran out of gas.
– Doug will try to call an Uber to pick him up on the freeway. Begs the driver when he refuses. Finally relents when Doug offers a big tip (which is all the money he has – he doesn’t know how he’s going to pay for dinner now).
– Claire very confused when Doug picks her up in an Uber.
And so on and so forth. The reason the sequence approach works so well is that it keeps the plot moving. You know that every 12 pages, you need a new development in the story. That ensures that the story is constantly moving and changing.
Now because this is just the second draft, you still have permission to follow new ideas while you’re writing. If you come up with a hilarious scene idea 50 pages in and it doesn’t quite fit into the story, include it anyway. We can figure out how to make it work in the next pass. However, if it’s not a hilarious idea. If it’s one of those, “This might be funny” ideas, ignore it. You need to start shaping your story so that it moves quickly. Even the funniest writers can lose the reader with a wandering plot. We need to give the reader a strong sense that the story is headed somewhere and is not a collection of disjointed jokes.
We’re going to be moving through this draft a lot faster than we were the first draft. So you need a strong plan going in. The less specific you are about the changes that need to be made, the longer and more frustrating your rewrite will be. You have one week to get this outline done and, starting next Monday, we begin the second draft!
Until then… :)
