What type of movie do you want to go and see; a dull one or a great one? While the question may appear a little (or a lot) on the brainless side, it’s a standard more screenplay writers need to apply.
Often they have a great idea, but really only fifty pages of real story. The other 40+ pages are just filler. The words amble along without any real purpose other than to get to the better part of the story. Those 40+ pages give the human race something to moan about. We all like to complain about something. Why chance them talking ‘down’ your 40+ pages when you have 50 great pages?
Now if you’d given them 90 pages of great story they could only talk you ‘up’.
When you want to go out on a hot date, you don’t wear your twenty year old t-shirt with food stains down the front. You prepare, you dress up, you groom. It’s the same for your screenplay.
- Prepare properly; be organised
- Dress up each word until it’s the best
- Groom your presentation to perfection
How often have you watched a film where it has such highs and lows you only remember the highs and there weren’t enough of them. You can’t really say what happened during the lows, but you do know they went on for a long time, far too long. Sometimes a movie has three great special effects or car chases, but happened in between?
Having a few ideas for a script gets you on the road to the average script. It’s only when you can maintain that flow throughout the whole 90+ pages that you’ll know you’re on to a winner.
If you don’t know by now the hot script comes from the re-writes, not your first draft. There might be several re-writes before you send it off to your friends and family, on spec to a producer or to your agent.
It’s during those re-writes that the professional screenplay writer will ‘out’ every word that doesn’t fit, every word that doesn’t move the story along to the next scene. They’ll not be prepared to accept anything that doesn’t keep the reader hooked and wanting to read each part of every page.
The reader will give up reading your average script by page ten, if you’re lucky they got that far.
To get yourself from the average screenplay to the hot one:
- What words can you take out?
- What makes the writing sharper?
- What dull writing can you exclude?
- What new scenes can you insert to up the tempo?
- What action have you over-written?
- Which characters change their personality too much?
- Have you cut out all the ‘thes’ and ‘thats’ as you can?
- How can you get more white space on the page?
They’re just a few of the key stages to go through to help you go from ‘average’ to ‘hot’.
When you need help with getting your screenplay ready to show to a reader, producer, studio or agent, check out our screenplay analysis services first.
Go re-write now.
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