Screenplay Editing In General

Screenplay Editing In General

One of the hardest things is letting go of what you've written -- spent so much time and agony writing constructing piece by piece, word by word -- to begin revising it and making it better. You see it locked in, written in stone, so to speak. To be really good, you have to see what you've written as a good jumping off point... because most every scene can be improved applying a different perspective or point of view.

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Like many screenwriters, I'll write a rough or first draft "long" -- meaning I'm overwriting description, adding extra thoughts and flourishes, etc. during my first pass, knowing full well I'll need to weed-whack the shit out of 'em next time around. The thinking is to stay focused on getting down any cool lines or ideas you're generating while in the pocket on a scene. Channel the potential of all that tasty stuff onto the page, collect the very best of it, then you'll have a ton of options when you return to shorten and reshape it. Go big, then pull back. Having too many good ideas to sort through is a high-class problem, and far preferable to not having enough, or worse, having discarded some real winners you didn't recognize at first blush.

Next pass, days or sometimes weeks later, I'll begin refining this material and paring it down. Say I've written a pretty cool character description but it's four complete sentences -- way too long. To get her down to proper one or two-sentence fighting weight, I start mashing-up all my contenders, toying them back and forth, cut and paste, in search of the perfect combination. Sometimes I even end up combining half of one line with half of another; whatever it takes to construct the most powerful description. Ideally, whatever you land on carries maximum impact, saying the most about who the character is the shortest possible length of time. Essentially, this is the goal of any scene, character or description -- brevity and precision. You tend to know when you've hit paydirt because it just sounds and feels right. This is where a writer's instincts kick in, bringing us back to Tony Gilroy's killer Chester Conklin description -- "Ivy League Oliver North. Buttoned down. Square jaw." Doesn't get much better than that.

What I'm saying here is to "kill your darlings" -- just don't kill them too quickly. Give them a chance to breathe first, then return and max out their potential with fresh eyes and ruthless, judicious editing.