Rewriting your Screenplay: The Road to your Audience
The promise of the rewrite is very sweet. I have collected
evidence that the more authentic the labor put into rewriting
your screenplay, the greater the reward, and the reward is high,
for whatever lovely, wonderful moments you might have discovered
in the frightening process of plowing through the first draft,
those moments, those seeds, are only seeds, and they only
fulfill their destiny as giant, involving scenes in the movie
that screens before people. So if I shortcut my revision, I will
miss the prize, pure and simple.
The process of rewriting is recreating. I need to make a
contract with myself to make room in every moment of my writing
for the imaginative magic of inspiration, that flash of
brilliance which some call talent, the muse, God, or
desperation, to deliver something that did not exist just a
second before, but now lives forever, like a huge white rabbit
suddenly from a hat. This usually happens when my fingers are on
the keyboard and there's white below from where I'm typing, and
I have no idea where I'm going. Or if I have some idea, I don't
have the answer, but I trust and that's it.
Rewriting is technically every change you make to your draft.
There, I said it, so now you can't come back and argue with me
about what you think a rewrite is. But now I will tell you what
rewriting really is, or what it really is not. Rewriting is not
cutting and pasting. It's not reading through your draft on your
computer screen and changing words. It's not pushing your cursor
down the page, highlighting text and deleting it. I think this
is called editing or deleting or garbage time or easy on the
damn brain, but it's not called rewriting over in the bust your
ass capital of screenplay planet.
Rewriting is almost starting completely over. It's almost
accepting that you have nothing after celebrating like you won
your tenth super bowl simply by typing the end and poking two
brass fasteners through a pile of paper. Rewriting is taking
that pile of paper, plopping it beside you where you can see it
without a lot of movement of the head, and copying it over with
an industrious attitude.
Okay, basically if you open a new file and name it second draft,
or seventh, or whatever, lie all you want, but if you simply
copy it over and the only thing that gets changed is the things
that make you physically jerk in your chair, then you are not
rewriting with an industrious attitude. An industrious attitude
can mean a lot of things, I will probably call it something else
next week, but it simply means you are open to work, and with a
rewrite, the premise to work is the belief your script needs
work. If you can't see much wrong, how can it need a lot of
work, and how is the rewrite going to work? It won't. So make
sure you have an open bent, and start typing it over.
What happens? Well, if you've never done it, I'm not gonna tell
you. A lot of screenwriters won't even admit it they've never
done it, because it breaks your neck. If you have done it, it's
almost time we did it again. Either way, go.
Now, how do I find out what's broken? It's not all on one page,
and it's hard to see the big picture of the awful thing. Well,
this isn't a book, this is just a short essay, so here's a short
list of tools to get yourself into and ready for your
rewrite.
First, you got ask yourself, what's the story, or more
specifically, what are the stories? I usually make up a list of
sentences that start with "The story of..." and fill in the
blanks. What are the stories that are emerging from your current
draft? What does your spirit want to tell versus what your poor
brain thought you were going to do back in the coffee shop? You
might find the list is long, and that's a problem, too. There's
usually a main one, maybe one close behind, then a few tiny
sweet ones. There is your family of stories. There they are.
Now. How are you treating them?
This is where you can make some kind of a chart. Like a
spreadsheet or something. Or the back of a dry cleaning receipt
will do. Divide up your script into the beginning, act one, act
two, act three, and the finish. By the way, I know there's all
sorts of act divisions. Modify my directions at your will. It's
fine. So within this chart you will pencil in the beats that
exist within the current layout of your script. When you're done
charting the arcs of your family of stories, you will
undoubtedly find HOLES. Wow. Nothing's there. Didn't see that
before. Okay, you better put something in there.
Let's say you got your chart pretty full, in fact, it looks like
the stories of your movie have something resembling a beginning,
middle and end. Now what you need is to make every scene as good
as your best scene. Yeah, terrible news. How do you determine
this? Grade your scenes. Some scenes might get an A. Others
maybe a B. Give your work an F or two. Once you do this, you
will know what scenes are functioning as placeholders and what
are moneymakers. In the end, rewriting is making everything the
most special ever. Anything short, and you have more rewriting
to do. Unless you can live with an uneven ride. But this is a
rewriting article, not a give up article.
Finally, a reminder. Screenwriting becomes artful when
compression arrives. Shorten your everything. All dialogue and
description is representative of this life traveled through a
living soul. Uh, that's you. A screenplay is just another poem,
it's just another small bit resembling something we recognize as
human beings. Seven Samurai is a very short movie compared to
what happens in a life, even shorter stacked against forever.
But it lives beyond forever, doesn't it?
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