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)
Week 7 (rewrite plan of attack)
The hardest thing about rewriting is encountering problems that you don’t have the answers for. For example, you might have a weak main character. This is one of the most common problems you’ll find in writing. One of the main characters isn’t clicking for some reason.
And because your main character has such an outsized influence on your story, you can’t fix the other problems until you fix this one. You don’t know what to do. Do you come up with an entirely new character? Do you tweak the character you’ve got? What are that character’s new characteristics? If he has new characteristics, does that mean you have to rethink the character’s backstory so it stays in alignment with his new actions?
This famously happened with the American version of The Office.
The original six episode run had a colder Michael Scott who did what he wanted without thinking about the consequences. This is a guy who, when Oscar, the lone latino in the office, asked him if he could play in the company basketball game, Michael replied, “I will require your talents come baseball season, my friend.”
In the second season, they softened Michael up by changing a key tenet of his personality: Michael cared only about being liked. Everything he did was about getting the employees to like him. For example, when it came time to strip the employees of major health care benefits, he handed the job off to Dwight so they didn’t all hate him. The Michael of the first season would’ve had no issues enacting those changes. This change made Michael more human (and, by proxy, likable).
You can see how minor changes can have a major influence on characters. And if those characters are big, those changes will have big effects on the story.
This brings us back to the original problem. You may have a character like First Season Michael who you know isn’t working but you don’t exactly know how to fix him. You don’t yet know that having Michael desperate to be liked is the answer. What do you do?
There are a couple of options. Talk to someone about it. Explain the character. Explain what you don’t like about them. And get their opinion. Even if they’re not writers, just hearing yourself talk out loud about the character and hearing someone else react often gives you ideas. I also love lists. Specifically, “Top 5” lists. Write down your Top 5 ideas on how to solve the problem.
Then you have to pick something. Even if you’re not positive it’s the right route, you don’t want to get in the habit where “not writing” is the norm. Because every day that the solution to your problem is, “I just need to think about it more,” you reward the decision not to write. It then becomes more likely that you won’t write tomorrow. Pretty soon, you’ve gone weeks, maybe even months, without writing anything.
At a certain point you need to go with the best idea you have and understand that you might get halfway through the rewrite before you realize the actual solution, which will require you to start the rewrite over. I’d rather you do that, though, then keep going without writing. Just like your hero needs to keep pushing the story forward, you, the screenwriter, need to keep pushing the script forward.
I speak from experience. I’ve let a lot of scripts die in the rewrite process because I couldn’t figure out the solution to one of the problems. And while, in some cases, it was best that those scripts died, in other cases, I could’ve had something good if I had just pushed through.
By the way, there is usually a problem in every rewrite that seems impossible to solve. But when you do figure that problem out, it’s a game-changing moment for the script. It tends to open up a whole new world of ideas.
Let’s get back on track, though.
You have the entire month of May to finish your rewrite.
That’s 25 pages per week, which is the same number of pages we did for the first draft. That means you’ll be rewriting 3-4 pages a day. You might ask why we’re not moving faster. Since we’ve written a lot of this stuff already, shouldn’t we be able to move through the script more quickly?
No because I’m factoring in problem-solving time. There are going to be days where you don’t know what to do and you will spend two hours trying to come up with solutions. Once you have your solutions, the next day you’ll write 6-8 pages to make up for it. Which sounds like a lot but we’re assuming most of the scenes you’ve written will stay. That means you’ll be able to cover certain scenes in a few minutes, adding a new line of dialogue or two and that’s it.
But whatever you do, do not go more than one day without writing. Because that will get you into the habit of not writing. I cannot stress how easy it is for two days of not writing to turn into two weeks of not writing. If you don’t have the perfect answer for how to fix something, go with the best thing you’ve got. I promise the perfect solution will eventually come to you. You’re just not ready for it yet.
If you ever feel like you’re in the weeds and have lost track of what it is you’re doing in your rewrite, go back to the list I asked you to place at the top of your outline. The Five biggest things that need to be improved. For example, here are the five biggest things I needed to improve in my fictional comedy feature script, “First Date.”
1) Make Doug more active!
2) Claire needs to be less angry, more fun.
3) Story needs to be more active. They should be on the move 95% of the time. If they’re sitting or standing while talking, change those scenes so that they’re moving somewhere.
4) Beef up Tony the Villain. Look to add more scenes of him wherever we can. Cut to him more.
5) Look to sneak in exposition about Claire’s weird dating history wherever you can but only if it’s natural. It should never read like exposition.
Do what the list tells you to do. Remember, you prioritized these. In other words, “Make Doug more active,” is the most important note to making your script better. Therefore, if that’s the ONLY THING YOU IMPROVE, your script is going to get a lot better. So go through your scenes and look for ways to make Doug more active in every one of them.
If you’re someone who can focus on 2-3 things at once, also try and make Claire more fun while keeping them on the move when they chat. If that feels overwhelming, just focus on the “Make Doug more Active” problem. Then go back through the script a second time and focus on making Claire more fun. Then go through the script a third time and focus on keeping them moving.
There’s no perfect way to rewrite a script. A lot of problems are interdependent on each other. They naturally influence one another. So if you’re making Doug more active, Claire is going to change by the nature of being around someone who’s more active. She’s going to have more opportunities to ‘react.’ Those reactions are where you can focus on making her more fun. So solving some problems might solve other problems.
In other cases, solving a problem will create a new problem. By making Doug more active and regimented, maybe he’s not as funny. The most active character in The Hangover was Phil (Bradley Cooper). He was also the least funny character. So now you have to figure out how to still make Doug funny. And this will require you to go over the script again, and again, and again. Even though you’re creating an “official” second draft of your script at the end of this month, you may go through the script a dozen times over that month, changing things at each pass.
Let’s be honest. A rewrite is like a birthday wish list. You’re not going to get everything you want. However, if the only thing you’re able to do is solve your 3 biggest problems, your script is going to get a ton better. So don’t get obsessed over little things like that punchline to the joke on page 72. Spending two hours getting that joke just right isn’t nearly as valuable as spending that time solidifying your main character.
25 pages by the end of the week!
Good luck everybody!
