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Rewriting

Once we subject the mainstream rules to scrutiny, we are left without a map upon which we can depend. By what standards do we critique our own work? How do we get ourselves out of trouble? What guides our rewrites? We don’t want to minimize how difficult it is to work without guidance. Models do provide an important framework. For instance, in her book Making a Good Script Great, Linda Seger offers a very good checklist of what each act should accomplish: “What kinds of action points are within my script? Barriers? Complications? Reversals? Where do they occur, and how often?”¹ are a few of the questions she asks about Act II. These questions are very helpful to a writer. However, we feel that checking your script against a list of questions does not address the fundamental issue. It presumes that the rules are more important than is the life or urgency that we hope will be created by your script. Anyone who has read amateur scripts will bear witness to this misappropriation of values. Most amateur scripts contain every one of the prescribed act breaks, and many would pass the checklist for act accomplishments, yet most of them are absolutely dead.

Screenplays fail not because they break the rules but because the writer has failed to imagine and see clearly. Screenplays fail because they lack urgency and life. The reason we talk about rules at all is because no one can directly teach you (much less talk about) how to imagine and how to generate urgency and life, especially in a book. We don’t pretend to be able to do so here. All we ask is that you don’t substitute preconceived models for the apparently formless chaos that, at some point, is a component of all truly creative projects. Time consuming or not, any screenplay that has life has to be invented from the ground up and has to discover its own rules.

So how do you rewrite? Beyond everything else, you seek to recapture the impulse that brought you to your particular script in the first place. Where do you get this impulse? Anywhere and everywhere. It depends on you, but it must be there. This is so critical that many books on fiction writing dedicate whole chapters to it. For instance, R.V. Cassill, in his excellent book Writing Fiction, worries about students getting sidetracked by sensational melodramatic subjects that have nothing to do with their own experience ² :

Harsh words, but true. If you don’t command the emotional resources to respond, to worry, to be obsessive over your experience, you will find it very difficult to write. We are not making the old argument that you should write only about what you know. Although this may (or may not) be useful in fiction writing, it would unduly limit the scope of your scriptwriting, because film requires a larger audience than does fiction. Rather, we are saying write only about things you feel passionate about, things you haven’t fully worked out, things you don’t mind going back to, again and again. Get down on paper words that express these feelings. Anything—an image, a scene, a moment of characterization, blocking, sound, conflict that embodies the story you want to tell.

Only when you put down such a concrete moment have you truly started to write. But once you have, you already have something greater than any abstract knowledge of structure will ever give you. You can continue to go back to that moment to recapture the impulse that brought you to your story in the first place. Eventually, as your story line grows clearer, you may want to replace this initial moment with another that seems to come closer to what you are after. But that doesn’t matter. You have started. Now you can build from there.

How do you do that? By trial and error. There is no other way. By going forward until you get lost. By going back to where it works, rekindling your ideas, recapturing your thread, and going forward again. This process of keeping the whole story in front of you is no easy task. Many writers use a bulletin board covered with scene cards to remind them of how the story is moving. Others write paragraphs summarizing the development of plot, theme, and character. Use whatever works, but learn the technique of stepping back from your story and seeing it in its totality.

Most writers will tell you that developing the middle of a story is the hardest part. Here again, we urge you not to worry about abstractions such as complications, barriers, and reversals but rather to go back to your initial impulse. The reason the middle is so difficult is because you’ve taken your original story idea as far as you can imagine and now you have to go even further. You might be working out of character. In that case, try to identify what you have only hinted at but not fully explored. What are the rough edges? The dark sides? The unspoken or misunderstood motivations? How can the character be pushed so that these are uncovered and how can the fullness of characterization be revealed? You might work thematically. In that case, try to identify what you are really trying to get at. What ambiguity or confusion in the situation has not yet been examined? What contradictions are there to be explored? What is always assumed but never examined? Suck everything you possibly can out of your material.

As you gain more experience, there will be much less trial and error. You will come up with possible solutions and quickly play them out in your head to see whether they will work for you. However, even as you do, you want to be careful. Writing is not like learning to tune a car—once learned, then many times repeated. To write well, you must go through the feeling of learning to write each time you start a new script. You must discover for yourself why the strategies you decide to use work for your particular story.

Taking Suggestions

You should feel as confident about rejecting suggestions as you feel about accepting them. A writer must have the ego, the toughness, to stand up and say, “This is my idea.” Otherwise, your script becomes an amalgam of all the responses to it. However, it is very important to learn to listen to suggestions. This requires getting over the natural defensiveness we all feel when we are criticized, in addition to understanding how to decipher someone else’s ideas.

Any criticism you can get is worth having. Note exactly what your reader is having difficulty with and pay particular attention to how the objections and suggestions are phrased. It is useful to write down the exact wording. If several readers object to the same thing, make sure you look at it closely. Don’t bother responding (otherwise, readers will start critiquing your comments rather than your script). Rather, study the suggestions when you are alone. A caveat: unless your critic is another writer whom you respect, never take suggestions at face value. The reason that we respond the way we do is frequently deeply embedded in the structure and development of the script. In most cases, it is very difficult for an untrained reader (and even a trained reader won’t know the script the way you do) to take into account the implications of making a change. Instead of taking your critics’ suggestions at face value, try to use them to figure out exactly what isn’t working. Frequently, you will find that you have inadvertently set up a line of expectation 20 pages before the scene your reader/critic is talking about, and that is what needs to be changed. Or an earlier moment that may be perfectly clear to you is read as something entirely different, which affects all that comes after it.

Once you make your corrections, it is tempting to go back to readers and ask them whether your fix of the earlier scene helps the problem, but in most cases you will be disappointed. Rather than showing them the earlier scene, you might want to ask your critics to read the whole script again. If you have made the right prior adjustments, they may come to the identical scene they complained about before and remark on how much better it is.

Sample Exercises

We have purposely kept this chapter general, because we don’t want to inadvertently propose a series of rules to replace those we are asking you to reconsider. We will, however, end with some sample exercises. These exercises are designed not so much to help you solve specific problems as much as they are to help you regard your work from varying perspectives. Once again, we believe that you get stuck when your vision fails. If you can see anew, you can discover solutions on your own.

Closing Distance: Write Out Subtext

The mechanics of screenwriting can seem quite clumsy. You may find yourself so concerned with visualizing and blocking that you forget what is going on with your characters. If you are writing a character-driven script, you want to avoid such loss of internal life. One solution is to use a stream-of-consciousness style to write the flow of your character’s thoughts under each piece of action or line of dialogue. Compare this to what is actually going on. You may discover several things:

1. Your character has no thoughts or has thoughts of no particular urgency. In this case, ask yourself: What is the point of the scene? If it doesn’t have a dramatic function, if it doesn’t cost the character something, cut it.
2. The thoughts are a mere rehash of the dialogue. You’ve got no sub-text and the scene will probably be dead. Remember, characters need not know exactly why they are speaking, or their reasons may contradict the viewer’s sense of their motivation. However, there must be some skew between dialogue and thought. Consider pushing the conflict harder to give your character reasons not to speak everything on her mind.
3. The thoughts don’t correspond to the actions that are supposed to express them. This is not as much of a problem as it may seem, because it means you know what the scene is about, but you just haven’t visualized it successfully. Try to imagine your character free of anything governing her actions except her thoughts. Let them move her. Use the camera to underscore this movement; reveal a sense of motivation to the viewer without exposing it to other characters in the scene.

Sometimes it is useful to start writing the character’s stream of consciousness from scratch. Write only the progression of the point-of-view character’s thoughts against the dialogue of the other characters. Only after you have the line of the thoughts written down do you want to write the dialogue that goes with them.

Gaining Distance: Shift the Point-of-View Character

Sometimes writers have the opposite problem—they are too close to a character. In a character-driven story, most often you will be writing from the perspective of a point-of-view character. Try arbitrarily reversing this. Write the scene from a totally different perspective. Use this new perspective to see your original point-of-view character from the outside. This technique is useful because writers frequently get so close to their point-of-view characters that the characters cease to exist in the concrete world. But remember, we will be seeing them on the screen. What will they be doing? How do they react and how are they reacted to? How will their thoughts be communicated or suppressed?

Gaining Even More Distance: Write a Totally Unreliable Scene

Do you want us to be with the character at a particular moment? Do you want us to understand that you approve of what the character is doing? This closeness can be harder than it looks, because all writers have a tendency to fall in love with their characters. When this happens, viewers tend to check out. Who cares about a paragon of virtue? Someone who only appears to be a paragon—now that’s interesting.

One way to avoid falling in love with your characters is to artificially distance yourself. Add some irony to the scene; have other characters contest your character; let your character do something you don’t feel all that happy about. Establishing distance can be enormously freeing. By implicitly telling your viewers that you don’t stand behind everything your character does, you don’t fall into the trap of trying to present yourself.

Easing Exposition: Rewrite an Early Scene as a Late Scene

Expository scenes are very difficult to bring to life. After several rewrites, it becomes difficult to sort out what is the bare minimum of information that must be communicated to make the script work. As the line of the script may have changed through your rewrites, you may be carrying much more expository weight than is needed.

One solution is to strip the scene of any expository function. Cut down the beginning of the scene and write the whole scene with the economy of a later scene. Assume we know enough to follow the scene. Now go back and identify exactly what information you need to communicate. Frequently, you will find that by stripping down the scene, you have so increased its dramatic urgency that it becomes easier to add the now-limited expository information.

Reshaping: Shift the Story Frame

Imagine your script starting on page 10 or page 20. Consider what this does for your story. Even if you don’t make these cuts, you may find that a great deal of information in the beginning of your script can be trimmed down. Now look at the end of your script. Have you gone far enough? Have you truly squeezed everything out of the story? Sometimes, after you’ve finished a draft, the whole window of the story can be adjusted to take in more of the story and less of the setup.

Visualizing: Write with Dialogue Crossed Out

You may want a scene to be stagy or talky. For example, Stranger Than Paradise is structured in single-shot scenes, with the camera looking in (as opposed to being in) on the action. By its very refusal to yield more insight into the characters through camera placement and cutting, this style becomes an expression of the material, insensate, physical world that denies us the romantic release of penetration into character. However, when you want to bring the camera inside your story, your staging should reveal the fundamental tension of each scene. The best way to make sure you are doing this is to cross out the dialogue, so that you can’t read its content (although you are still aware of its placement). Reading just the stage directions, you should still be able to identify the scene’s basic dramatic movement, the dominant character, and the beat where the scene turns.

Giving the Scene Some Breathing Room: Rewrite with an Opposite Outcome

One of the great (and true) clichés of realistic narrative writing is that you want to create scenes that have the possibility of coming out in at least two different ways, and you want to sustain such a possibility for as long as you can. This balancing of choices allows the viewer to participate in the drama by constantly weighing and rethinking the possible outcome.

Try rewriting a scene and intentionally reverse the outcome. If you have written a scene in which the outcome is determined too early, you will have to do a great deal of rewriting to reverse it. Once you do, go back and, with the minimum of changes, restore the original direction of your ending. You will find that the tension now sustains itself to the end of the scene. Such a technique is also useful for characters written as all dark (evil). Try reversing them and see what dimension emerges.

Taking the Curse Off: Write with Overt Reasons, Not to Explain

Sometimes writers—more often than not, sensitive writers— cannot resist the opportunity of having the characters explain exactly what they feel. The explanations may even be extended to include little essays on the theme. We see no problem with this if there are conflicting viewpoints presented with equal authorial authority. As long as the viewer has to work to synthesize meaning, multiple voices can only contribute to the richness of the script.³ Think how resonant the contrasting perspectives of Omar and Johnny are in My Beautiful Laundrette. However, you want to avoid head-on, reliable exegeses in which you tell us exactly what you think about the situation. Such commentary is impossible to play, causing actors to use the term taking the curse off when they find a way to diminish the obviousness of these lines.

The solution is simple. Find an overt reason in the scene that keeps the character from explaining. A man who tells a woman that he desires her but is afraid of losing her is a lot less interesting (to us and to her) than is the man who avoids such a confession, because he knows that is precisely what would doom him.

Breaking Out of the Narrow Mind-Set: Ask a Whole Group to Rewrite Your Scene

It takes considerable courage to have a class or workshop rewrite your scene, but it can prove to be very worthwhile. You are not looking for answers; rather, you want to break out of the narrow mind-set with which you have approached the scene, by seeing in just how many directions it might actually go. You won’t believe what people will discover in a scene that you felt you had already thought through.

Conclusion

Writing beyond the rules requires that you approach any given rule with skepticism and that you don’t use a rule until you are satisfied that it works for you. The difficulty with such an approach is that you have no authority, no place to go for guidance. We suggest that you learn to look at the strength of your own impulses for guidance and that you build from this through trial and error. Although this is more frightening than working with a preconceived model, it encourages you to do the real exploration necessary to write material that is truly original and alive.

References

1.  L. Seger, Making a Good Script Great (New York, NY: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1987), 58.

2.  R. V. Cassill, Writing Fiction (New York, NY: Prentice Hall, 1975), 11–12.

3.  See M. M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays ed. M. Holquist, trans. and ed. V. Liapunov, trans. K. Brostrom (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1985), 259–422.