Things To Look Out For In The Re-Write?

speed traps. small children. pot holes.

You know, usual stuff.

- Incorrect Character Names
- Double Check Scene Headings
- Words that you might use one to many times in a action scene or dialogue.
- Punctuation
- Grammar
- Incorrect spellings (If I see lose spelled loose one more time this week I am going to LOSE IT!)

whistlelock said:

speed traps. small children. pot holes.

You know, usual stuff.

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Specially things that go clunk!

Is your protagonist interesting enough and/or sympathetic enough for the audience to give a damn what happens to them? Is he/she the focal character, would the audience know it's the protag's story? Or does your cast of funny, gorgeous, dangerous, quirky supporting characters overshadow the protag?

-Derek
My Web Page - shameless vampyre fiction & other shameless writings.
It's a helluva day at sea, Sir!

zeprosnepsid said:

I'm in the middle of my re-write and it's going ok. But I was wondering if I'm missing/forgetting things. Anyone have any good advice for stuff to look out for in the re-write?

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This sorta depends on your process. For example, if you are intending to come out of this draft with a final draft, that's one thing. But if you know in advance that your final draft will really come at third or fourth, then it's a different ballgame.

My process goes like this --

First draft -- written from the heart, effusive, long, somewhat rough.

Second draft -- a slower paced and more deliberate front-to-back go through reading and editing/revising on the fly to bring everything up closer to a more finished rendition. Everything. This draft often takes two or three times as long as the first draft. It is ponderous work. Five hours a day the brain turns to mush. The mantra is story, story, story, and form, form, form

Third draft -- to address specifics, may involve several front-to-back editing-on-the fly run throughs that focus on specific parts: scene captions, action blocks, consistency in character's speech and behavior, descriptions, story fabric and sense, dramatic arcs and beats, theatricality, level of verisimilitude, subtext, the off screen movie, and so on ... lots to go over. A key mantra is wordsmithing.

Fourth draft -- dialogue and narrative polish, tidy up any loose ends, call it done.

In this process no part of the script is ever developed to a much higher level than any other part ... it all comes along at the same pace and it's all a development process. It's like sculpting.

I'll tell ya this, many screenwriters employ a process that's not dissimilar from what I've outlined here and the reason they do is because to take a first draft and develop it into a final draft in one iteration is a brutal task. You can only do a few pages of it a day. You can spend two or three or four or five days on a scene or a short sequence working this way. It goes stale on you when you spend that much time on one relatively small segment.

More effective to contemplate three or four drafts and spread the work out over them, doing less in each pass but nevertheless developing the whole up as you go.

To my eye, there's just too much to it to beat it out in two drafts, without spending four months on the second one pounding on a few pages each day.

While doing a second draft the odds are against you finding every goofup, every lousy sentence, wrongly tensed paragrapah, mis-spelled word, poorly formed caption ... not to mention all the story stuff you have to keep track of and fix as you go. You'll miss some things because you're looking so closely and trying so hard you'll fatigue, and fatigue is the enemy. A fatigued writer misses things.

Instead, spread the work out, do some here, do some there, do some everywhere, and bring the piece along through a series of drafts/iterations none of which comprise the entire effort, just pieces or levels or parts of it.

Takes me six to nine months, although I did one in two months.

Be nice to yourself.

Yeah i suppose everyone has their own way.

On my last one i just wrote it, and reread and re-edited it over and over. I probably done that about 10 - 15 times. It took ages. I basically kept reading over the parts that didn't sound right to me, and kept an eye out for them and with things relating to them in the story when i read over it.

Eventually i could comfortably stop when the script sounded right to me. With the dialogue, description and setting all doing well in my eyes.

But then it turned out my story was the fault. Still working on it ... haha

Some things to look for:

Are your characters consistant? Is thier voice and mannerisms the same through out?

Do you have logic gaps? Is there any thing that happens because YOU want / need it to happen but it isn't believable? Or because you've fogotten what you wrote on page 20 and now something totally different happens on page 100?

Are there two many characters? Could one or more characters be meshed together?

Have you stuck with one clear plot and one subplot? Does that subplot support the main story OR skew things off in to Never-never land?

Does your pacing have a clear Night and Day flow?(depending on the needs of the story.) I've looked through a few of my scripts and suddenly realized that it had been DAY for like 36 hours. Quite a few stories CAN take place during just daylight hours. But some times we don't consider the real time factor.

Have you fallen in to a writing rythem? The way the paragraphs move have this hidden, consistent rythem. The paragraphs kinda go bah, bah, bump, bah, bah, bump. bah, bah BANG.
After a few pages the reader unconsciously counts out the beat and if it doesn't start lulling them to sleep then they can anticipate when the next BANG is coming. So, mix up your paragraph lengths. Try to have moments where things and the writing move really fast. The lines are short, tight, the action really jumping.
Then, when things settle down, let your writing relax just a little bit. Maybe do a slightly longer, more detailed paragraph mixed in with a one liner.

Look for little story mole hills that gradually grow in to mountains over the course of the script. Some times you like a certain idea or story point at the beginning but by the end of the script it's overwhelmed things, or not turned out right, or it's twisted a character too much.

Hope that helps.

jbraykr said:

- Does each page approximately equal one minute? Do you have sparse directions like, "They fight" for actions that might take two or three minutes?

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You make some very good points, jbrayker, but this one puzzles me ... because I don't think it's one you can worry about let alone do anything about.

We say a page of script "equals a minute of screen time," and this is generally true as an average.

But where did this rule of thumb come from? What are its origins?

Well, a long time ago in Hollywood, say roughly 40 years past, someone at some studio took a thousand scripts of produced pictures, summed up their number of pages and summed up the run times of the movies, and discovered that the average page in all those scripts worked out to be a minute of screen time. Wolla! Mind you, writer's drafts were used in this exercise, not shooting scripts. In other words, the spec renditions.

Ever since, any agent, producer, d-person, director, or whomever picked up a new script has turned to the last page to see its number, and if they found it to be 120 or less, they figured they had a workable piece in their hands in terms of its movie's running time ... and, 120 pages became the standard maximum length for spec feature screenplays and Courier 12 became the standard font (because all those thousand screenplays had been typed on a typewriter using that font, or the contemporary equivalent of the day, Pica). For the results of the analysis to hold, this font would have to be used ... or any font that has its space-using characteristics, 10 CPI and fixed pitch.

Hence, any screenwriter who employs the standard master scene form and uses the standard font in their writing will create pages that will average a minute of screen time each, regardless of what else they may do.

It's not something a writer has to worry about.

Unless of course they go crazy and write something that's so off the wall it doesn't comport. But few do this.

The longest script I've ever read is "The Boston Strangler," which came in at a hefty 343 pages. I'm not sure how long that movie runs, but if the rule holds it'd be something like (343/60=) 5.7 hours. But as we all know, this picture doesn't run anywhere near that length, although it is long for a feature. I think the 343 page rendition of the script I have was chopped down in the course of the project's development.

The thing a writer can do to control runtime is keep their work at or less than 120 pages. In fact, in the modern context, people seem to prefer feature specs that are somewhere between 100 and 110 pages, less if it's a comedy, like 90 to 100. Even so, I think most agents and producers and d-people will read something that's 120 pages. They'll even read longer pieces if they come with a trusted referral.

Some Production Managers are very good at estimating runtime by doing a scene analysis, which they sometimes do when breaking a spec down to prepare a shooting script from it, especially if there appears to be runtime issues in the work.

I've penned ten features and never once thought about runtime. I have of course thought about page count and brought these ten scripts in at between 106 to 123 pages. In fifteen years I've gotten something like 50 reads and not once has any one of them generated comments as to run time, although one guy did make note once of the fact that I had one page in a piece that "would run seven minutes." It wasn't a deal killer, though.

In the screenwriting software I've used over the past five years (Sophocles) there's a "runtime strip" down the right hand side of the editing page on which cumulative run time is stamped every fifteen seconds. It never shows exactly a minute per page nor does it ever correlate precisely to the rule at the end. My 123 pager shows a total runtime of 124 and-a-half minutes, for example. I don't know anything about the algorithm the program uses to do this calculation; I asked the program's developer about it once and he didn't wanna talk about it, "That's proprietary," he said, "but it does have several variables."

I'll bet.

But it almost has to be based on an analysis of word counts by part, action, dialogue, captions, transition outs, and wrylies.

To boil it all down, I don't think a writer need concern themselves with run time ... except in terms of overall page count, and in terms of abiding by the format rules that govern margins and spacing, assuming they have good command of their economy in writing and use Courier 12.

Goodwriterguy said:

You make some very good points, jbrayker, but this one puzzles me ... because I don't think it's one you can worry about let alone do anything about.

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True Dat.

It is an average and depends on the action/dialogue ratio. Dialogue plays quicker than action as a rule [ in page count]

Don't time individual pages. If your script is reasonably well formatted then the overall page count is what matters.

To the reader!

jbraykr said:

The tragi-comic example of how far you can go off the track trying to control filmic elements is F. Scott Fitzgerald, a bona fide great novelist who approached movies like he was a composer and everyone else, down to the cameraman and gaffer, so many musicians. So he got all tangled up laying out camera angles and whatnot, and never got any control of his craft.

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JB. I could be wrong but I was under the impression that F.Scott Fitzgerald's problems with screenwriting were more to do with his alcoholism, his loopy wife and his inability to 'write what you see'. So much so that that Sam Goldwyn famously threw a script at him saying ' We can't shoot adjectives Mr Fitzgerald!'

jbraykr said:

You're right, but one doesn't exclude the other. Alcoholism is foremost a disease of control, and Fitzgerald's approach to screenwriting was nothing if not almost monomaniacally controlling. The fact that he couldn't 'write what you see,' could also be regarded as an expression of that flawed approach.

There were, of course, great screenwriters who were alcoholic. But they tended to express that controlling streak by being directors as well. John Ford and Sam Peckinpah are examples that I think of, right away, though I'm sure any one interested in film history could name others.

There are lessons to be learned from this, even if you don't have a drinking problem. Namely: let the little things be taken care of by those who are paid to take care of them, up to and including the director. Or, as they say, "Let go and let God."

p.s. My source for info about Fitzgerald was: Syd Field: Screenplay. The Foundations of Screenwriting. A Dell Trade Paperback. 1984 pp.168-173.
The relevant passage:

"Screenplay form is simple; so simple, in fact, that most people try to make it more complex..."
"F. Scott Fitzgerald is a perfect example. Perhaps the most gifted American novelist of the twentieth century, Fitzgerald came to Hollywood to write screenplays. He failed miserably.
"He tried 'to "learn" CAMERA ANGLES and the intricate technology of film, and he let that get in the way of his screenwriting. Not one script he worked on was made without extensive rewriting. His only screenwriting achievement is unfinished, a script called Infidelity written for Joan Crawford in the I930s. lt<caron>s a beautiful script, patterned like a visual fugue, but the third act is incomplete and it lies gathering dust in the studio vaults."

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Screenwriting isn't novel writing. Can't deny it. But again I think you are wrong on Fitzgerald's problems.

What was in his head wasn't ''shootable''

jbraykr said:

What was "in his (Fitzgerald's) head" was perfectly shootable, as is proven by the fact that successful movies were made of both
Tender Is the Night and The Great Gatsby.

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Except that he wrote neither of the screenplays.

jbraykr said:

That's my entire point.

And - far as I'm concerned - the end of the story.

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I missed that. Sorry

I hear ya ...

jbraykr said:

I threw in the business of one page=one minute because it's something I keep reminding myself that I need to do, (but seldom follow up on unless it jumps off the page at me). It probably does need to be checked out when you're in the middle-revision realm. But I agree, it's not a scientific ratio to be maintained at all costs.

My problem's usually the opposite of "They fight" (for 10 minutes). Because I come from the novel arena, I'm TOO detailed, TOO descriptive, and often dangerously directive. Therefore, one of my (non-dialog) pages can translate thirty or forty seconds. This is something that good revision should iron out.

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Which is why my comment included this: "assuming they have good command of their economy in writing."

But it's something we writer's back into, not achieve by frontal assault. If we learn the principles of highly economic writing and learn to write economically in the sort of manner that's common or expected in a screenplay, we solve any run time issues we may otherwise create.

A director will read "They fight" and know immediately it can't go on for ten minutes, or even four minutes or three. It's gotta be a minute or less, preferably less, and they'll shoot it that way, unless it's "Rocky IV" or "Hurricane" or "Fight Club." A reader reads "They fight" and intuitively knows the same thing.

The number of words a description uses doesn't correlate one-to-one with the screen time of the action described.

You seem to have grappled more with learning to write screenplay narrative than with runtime issues, that is, to gain an appropriate degree of economy. But economy is a goal simply because we've learned that great detail misses the point, and we can write almost telegraphically and convey what we want to convey. If it can be done in 70 words with good effect, why use 200 words? Why indeed.

The fact that screenplay narrative isn't prose is missed on a lot of folks. they try to read it as if it were prose, and some try to write it as though it were prose. But it isn't, and hardly ever the twain shall meet.

It is a starkly different way of writing. And for someone who has toiled with prose for some years, making the change can be a trying experience. Hard to teach an old dog new tricks. Especially when the differences are nowhere articulated very well.

jbraykr said:

And I've read screenplays where the non-dialogue stuff reads like a synopsis. That's no good, either.

I think it's partly a matter of keeping in mind that you're writing a movie, not a book. No one's ever going to read it for what it is, (but for what it's the skeleton of).

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The whole idea of a screenplay is for it to cause the movie to explode on the mental movie screens of its readers, a reader is supposed to "see the movie" as they read it, see it and hear it. Good screenwriting causes this reaction. The real hit of reading a screenplay comes in the form of the images it causes to cascade in the minds of those who read it. Not prose, although there is crossover, to be sure. But in a screenplay, that's all it is no more, no less. The subtext of "read my screenplay" is "see my movie."

A screenwrityer is bests served if he or she writes paragraphs that take about as long to read as the typical feature takes to cut, which is about seven to twelve seconds, on average. If movies cut every seven to twelve seconds and a screenplay requires you jump to a new paragraph at about the same interval, you'll get a much more movie-like read out of it, especially if you are writing those paragraphs like cuts in terms of what you include in them, reactions, independent actions or highly correlated ones, POVs, long shots, medium shots, face takes.

One simply cannot read a screenplay the same way they read a piece of prose. They are different animals. And because they are, one cannot write tem in the same way, either, and hope to get there from here.

One who masters the art and craft of writing screenplay narrative will never suffer a screen time issue.

jbraykr said:

The tragi-comic example of how far you can go off the track trying to control filmic elements is F. Scott Fitzgerald, a bona fide great novelist who approached movies like he was a composer and everyone else, down to the cameraman and gaffer, so many musicians. So he got all tangled up laying out camera angles and whatnot, and never got any control of his craft.

Nowadays, we've veered to the other extreme, but - since directors and technicians know their trade as well or better than we know ours - there's usually no reason to worry about it.

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Fitzgerald wrote in a time when the master scene spec form did not exist, or was just barely beginning to emerge. Hell, even when I started screenwriting there were plenty of vestiges of the old 1930's/40's form, including DOLLY SHOT and RACK FOCUS and PUSH IN and PULL BACK and PULL BACK TO REVEAL and INCLUDE... a boatload of that stuff. In those days you had to include every character in your scene in the damned scene caption! And scenes were numbered.

The form we use today only came fully together in the late 70's, early 80's, and it was slow in coming, believe me.

But the transformation freed the spec writer from the FRAME and the CAMERA and the LENS and gave him or her an opportunity to go deeper into what was left, to discover tons of art and craft landscape to work with, tons. We discovered subtext, the off screen movie, ways of conveying feelings that places exhibit or characters experience, and a whole bunch of other stuff. I think Goldman was the first guy to really twig on this.

There wasn't a "how to" book published on writing master scene specs until about 1984, a bit late in the game for Fitzgerald. Any one of us could have squared him away in fifteen minutes. But we didn't know then what we know now, if indeed we were even alive, and certainly he didn't know it either. Such was his downfall as a screenwriter. No blame.

On and on!

Go through and...


a) make sure each scene starts as late as possible
b) make sure each scene ends as soon as possible
c) make sure every scene has a setup or payoff
d) make sure every scene advances the plotline
e) brainstorm every scene. does it HAVE to be in this location? How cliche is the location? What would be a better location
f) brainstorm every prop. why is he using this? does he have to use this? what else could he use?
g) look for subtextual opportunities.