HOW DO YOU KNOW WHEN YOUR SCREENPLAY IS DONE?

[spb_column width="1/1" el_position="first last"] [spb_text_block pb_margin_bottom="no" pb_border_bottom="no" width="1/1" el_position="first last"]   By, Jacob Krueger [/spb_text_block] [/spb_column] [divider type="standard" text="Go to top" full_width="no" width="1/1" el_position="first last"] [fullwidth_text alt_background="none" width="1/1" el_position="first last"] How do you know when your screenplay is done? Podcast Transcript: Recently we’ve been getting a lot of questions from our listeners, so I’m going to use today’s podcast to answer one of the most frequently asked questions. If you have a question for me that you would like answered, feel free to reach out to me on Facebook or Twitter and I’ll try to answer as many of them as I can on this podcast.   The question that we’re going to be discussing today is one that comes up all the time, “How do you know when your screenplay is done?”   I felt this is a particularly interesting question to look at, especially in light of the concepts we discussed last week about pitching.   Obviously you don’t want to be going out trying to sell your script, trying to pitch your script, if it’s not done. And at the same time, as screenwriters we find ourselves in this endless cycle of not done, not done, not done, not done, not done, not done. Rewriting, rewriting, rewriting. Starting over, starting over, starting over.   So how do you know when that cycle needs to end? How do you know when your script is actually done?   One of the things you have to understand if you’re going to answer this question is that there's a big difference between two words that we often use interchangeably. There’s a big difference between finished and done.   I believe it was Oscar Wilde who first said, great scripts “aren’t finished, they’re merely abandoned.”   As much as we would like to believe that someday this darn thing is truly going to be done, the truth is there is almost always more that we can do to a script. There’s almost always something we could ask, something that we could deepen, something that we could layer or nuance.   That means our criteria for actually completing our goals when it comes to screenwriting are actually different from almost any non-artistic field that we could be working in. I think this is true for any art, whether it’s painting, novels, poetry, or music. In the arts, we don’t get the same feeling of completion that an accountant gets. Or that a salesperson gets. Or that a burger flipper gets. There’s no clear place where it is truly done where all the criteria have been met.   So if we’re going to feel successful, if we’re going to be successful, and if we’re even going to know we're successful, we need a different way of evaluating ourselves. We need a different type of criteria.   We can’t just use a checklist because there’s always going to be something else added to that checklist. We can’t just use a bunch of coverage notes because no matter how brilliant your coverage reader may be-- and the truth is, a lot of them are not brilliant -- they’re going to be full of conflicting feedback. And as soon as you start making changes, half of those written notes are going to change and are no longer going to be valid.   We can’t merely rely on the advice of others, because our work is subjective and some people are going to love it, and some people are going to hate it.   So what are we supposed to rely on?   What we actually need to rely on are two separate things that end up working together. We need to first rely on our feelings as the writer. Then we need to rely on the feedback that we’re receiving from the outside. And this is where that distinction between finished and done becomes so important. Every time you reach the end of a draft, there are two very important questions you need to ask yourself. Question number 1 is “Am I done?” And question number 2 is “Is it finished?”   These questions are very different because one is about your personal experience as the writer of this project, and the other is about the audience’s experience of your script.   So, before we get to finished let's start with done.   Let’s talk about what it means to be done.   Because here’s the weird thing about screenwriting. You are going to write some really good scripts, and you’re going to write some really bad scripts. And oftentimes you’re going to have absolutely no control over whether they come out beautiful, or whether they come out terrible.   The truth is that any script can become good if you’re willing to push on it hard enough. But sometimes as writers, we do take wrong turns. We do get seduced by scripts that are actually not really serving our voice as writers, or are not serving the questions that are burning for us right now.   Similarly, sometimes an idea that feels like it’s going to be terrible, or external, or “off” in some way, actually turns out really brilliant when you start to write.   No matter how great your idea, or how terrible your idea, you’re pretty much guaranteed to have the same experience: about halfway through the script you’re going to think your idea sucks.   No matter how brilliant your idea was in the beginning, no matter how wonderful it was, somewhere along the line you’re gonna think it sucks. So, what a lot of writers end up doing is, they get about halfway through script, after script, after script-- or maybe not even halfway through, maybe 30 pages in, or 10 pages in-- script, after script, after script, after script, and then they abandon the idea. They tell themselves, “you know what, this is bad, this is never gonna come out.”   Other writers get stuck in a different cycle where they finish draft, after draft, after draft, after draft. And each draft seems to make no improvement over the one before! The script becomes different, but actually no closer to finished. It simply becomes a different kind of screenplay.   If we're gonna succeed, if we're gonna ever be finished, or done, we need to avoid both of these traps.   The avoidance of these traps actually begins at the goal-setting process. So the first thing you need to know is what are you going for right now as a writer: what is your goal? If you don’t know your goal you will never know if you’re done. And if you don’t know when you’re done, you will never feel successful. To go back to the examples that I just gave you. If your goal is to finish a script, you might feel really terrible after starting 10 scripts and abandoning all of them. On the other hand, if your goal is to explore for a while, and see what the next thing that grabs you is, starting 10 scripts and abandoning them might be a really brilliant thing to do. It might be a great step in the right direction.   If your goal is to experiment and broaden a skill in yourself, playing around with a bunch of scenes that don’t go anywhere might be wonderful, whereas if your goal is to finish this draft by May 23rd, then that kind of process would be very bad. You wouldn’t be done.   Done depends on the goal. And that means you need to become an expert at goal-setting for yourself so that you could know when you actually achieved done.   Which means, at the beginning of your writing process, when you start a new project, the very first thing you should do is set a goal.   Set a goal, not based on anybody else’s desire, not based on anything anybody else told you to do, not based on what you should do-- in the history of time no one has ever actually done what they should do. Don’t base it on anything except what you want right now for yourself as a writer.   Remember that this goal does not have to be about the project, because everything you write is actually serving two different parts of you. It’s serving the growing writer-- it’s serving your skills, your craft, your art, your voice, the tools that you want to develop as a writer, your writer muscles. And it’s also serving the project.   You’re always serving these two things at the same time.   So the first question you want to ask yourself is: what is my project goal?   Then you may want to ask yourself: what is my artistic goal?   You don’t want to set 12 goals. You want to set one. And this is one of the mistakes people make as they write, and especially the mistake they make as they rewrite.   Oftentimes our rewrites turn into endless checklists of endless things that we have to do endlessly.   We go in and do all the things in our checklist, and our script doesn’t actually get any better. And we don’t feel any closer to finished. Oftentimes we go into a rewrite and don’t even know what we’re improving! We don’t even know what we’re taking to the next level. We don’t even know what our goal is. We just know vaguely that we want to make it better.   If you’re going to be done you need a specific goal. And a specific goal can be something like this:   I want to play around and just explore different characters who speak differently.   I want to start a bunch of different stuff and see if there’s one that grabs my attention.   I want to play around with theme.   I want to write something about the theme of love.   I want to explore a question that haunts me.   I want to get stronger at using images. I want to write a script or a scene where 80% is image and only 20% is dialogue.   I want to become more comfortable with dialogue; I want to really learn how to let my characters’ voices sing, and I’m going to just write scenes where characters talk to each other a lot.   These are all really specific goals. They allow us to focus on one thing instead of 20 things. We’re going to set an end date for that goal so we know when we’re done.