Top 10 Revision Tips Podcast: Part 2

If you listened to the previous episode of this podcast, you have probably developed a pretty valuable approach for how to revise your screenplay. And you know that approach focuses on these 5 simple tips for revision: #1 - Never Rewrite Without a Goal #2 - Follow Your North Star #3 - Concentrate on What’s Working #4 - Stay Away From Quick Fixes #5 - Beware Written Notes So this week, we’re going to work on taking your revision process to the next level, with five more helpful tips about revising your script. REVISION TIP #6 – Use Your Theme If you’ve ever been part of an unmoderated writing group, you already know what it’s like to lose control of your revision. Without a strong unifying voice to make order out of the chaos, it’s amazing how much turmoil even a small group of well-intentioned writers can bring to your screenplay, pushing and pulling your revision in so many different directions with their “brilliant ideas” that before long you don’t even know what you’re writing anymore! And as anyone who has ever worked professionally as a screenwriter can tell you, the more you grow in your career, the more challenging it becomes to maintain a point of creative focus for your revisions. Succeeding as a professional writer means learning to navigate the twists and turns in the development process, often balancing the demands of half a dozen different producers, all with their own (often conflicting) agendas for the project, without losing your own creative voice. Which means that, if you want to succeed in this industry and actually see your movies make it to the screen, you need to start building those skills in yourself now. That means not only developing the skills you need to navigate the often contradictory feedback you get from other people (friends, classmates, coverage readers, producers, teachers, agents, managers), but also learning how to steer the course through the shifting winds of your own feelings about your writing and the perilous waves of “brilliant ideas” that tend to crash across the bows of our own creative ships. The real terror of the blank page is that anything is possible; and the real terror of a rewrite is that everything becomes possible all over again. If you’re willing to put in the time and effort and just keep asking “what if?” you can develop Thelma and Louise until it turns into The Wrestler (think about it). But along the way, you’re going to drive yourself absolutely out of your mind. And if you’ve ever worked on a revision, you’ve probably found yourself going down that rabbit hole. So how do you make sense of all the thousands of ideas vying for your attention? How do you bring order to the chaos, wrangle all these crazy notes to the ground, hold your own in a development meeting, and feel confidence in each decision you make in your revision? That process always begins with theme.   There are very few people in the world who are truly good at developing scripts, but those who are all have one thing in common. Before they start trying to come up with a single idea or solve a single problem, they always ask the same question about the script: what’s it about? And that doesn’t mean “what could it be about?” or “what was the conscious plan the writer had for the script when they first sat down to write” or even “what could I make it about?” That means seeking out what already has been built, whether consciously or unconsciously, in the pages that already exist, no matter how problematic they may be. What are the ideas that keep on coming up again and again, page after page? What are the questions that seem to tie together the most visceral and exciting scenes in your movie, or the turning points in your character’s journey? What makes this screenplay matter to you as a writer? What is really being built here? And how can you boil that all down to a single guiding theme so simple that you can remember it at every phase of your rewrite without even thinking about it. No matter how good your draft may be, there’s no doubt that huge changes are going to happen in your revision.  But until you know the one simple thing you’re building, you’ll never know which changes will serve your story, and which will simply distract from it. Any note (and any idea) is only valuable in the context of what you’re building. If you were an architect working on a new cathedral, an idea for a breathtaking stained glass window might be a great place to put your energy. But, if you’re building a bomb shelter, that same stained glass window becomes a total hazard of potentially falling glass! In the last installment of this podcast, we talked about following a North Star for your revision-- a goal to focus on as a writer. Well your theme is like a North Star for your whole script, and every scene and every character you create. No matter how lost you get, it will always guide you in the right direction. And the great thing is, you don’t even have to make it up! Once you learn how to look, you’ll be amazed to discover that your theme already exists in almost every page of your script, often buried under the surface, sometimes disguised or masked by undeveloped craft or hidden behind piles other unrelated themes and ideas. But present nonetheless.  Because the theme is that subconscious, broken and beautiful thing in you that’s driving you to do this crazy act of writing in the first place. That doesn’t mean that every idea that fits your theme is going to work. But it does mean that, by identifying your theme, you can cut through all the clutter and distractions. It means you can know what to say “yes” to, and what to say “no” to at each phase of your revision. It means you can focus your energy on the ideas that best serve the one unifying theme of your story, rather than getting distracted by the many red herrings that don’t. Most importantly, as you grow in your professional career, if you can learn to agree on a theme with your production team before you start revising, it will allow you not only to wrangle your own ideas, but also to focus the energy of all those crazy producers, directors, managers, agents, and movie stars on the ideas that best serve your main intentions for the project. REVISION TIP #7 – When in Doubt Cut It Out Many writers make the mistake of thinking that rewriting is primarily about finding that “something missing” in your scene, adding that perfect line of dialogue or discovering that perfect image to take your script to the next level. And it’s true that these are major parts of rewriting. But oftentimes the best (and easiest) rewrites begin not by adding anything at all, but simply by stripping away the stuff that’s obscuring the real heart of the scene. It’s natural that early drafts tend to be overwritten—after all, it’s in these early drafts that you’re supposed to be exploring the limits of what your scenes and your story can be. But once you’ve discovered the core of what the scene is really about, you’ve got to cut away all those extra layers, so other people can perceive that essence in its most pure and beautiful form. This always begins with theme. Ask yourself “what is this scene really about?” And then see what happens if you cut away anything that doesn’t doesn’t work to serve that primary intention. You might find yourself pleasantly surprised to discover that the more you cut, the stronger your scene becomes. That’s because the best scenes function like a collection of greatest hits, catapulting the audience and the character from one compelling moment to the next. When you cut down your screenplay to its most essential elements, it allows readers to get right to the meat of your scene, without having to sort through all that garnish. From a commercial perspective, it also allows your scene to be read and understood more quickly, which will pay off big time when it’s being skimmed by a time-crunched coverage reader. Making these kinds of cuts is quick, easy, and extraordinarily effective.  But it’s also emotionally challenging for two reasons. The first is that we tend to like what we’ve written, and cutting away good writing, even if it doesn’t serve our story, can be incredibly painful.   The second is that we don’t tend to trust ourselves. We imagine that if we just got right to the heart of the scene, keeping only our very best lines and our very best actions or images, the audience would never understand. Or even worse, we fear that if we cut that 5 page scene down to one brilliant half a page, we’d suddenly have to come up with so much more story to fill those extra pages! But the truth is, if you really want to take your script to the next level, you’re going to need those extra pages! Cutting out the wasted space in your script (getting to the best stuff faster and faster and faster) opens up room for you to take your story and your character’s journey beyond what even you imagined when you first sat down to write. And this is exactly what you really need to do if you want to break in as a writer. While professionals with impressive resumes and extensive relationships may be able to get away with phoning in scripts that play by the rules and simply meet the expectations of the audience, to get a producer to take a chance on you as a writer, you’ve got to deliver even more than they expect. You’ve got to blow them away. So next time, before you start adding to your scene, see what happens if you try to tell the whole story of the scene with the fewest lines possible. Cut it down to the very minimum. And then cut it even further. Cut everything boring, everything lackluster, everything redundant and everything that doesn’t serve your theme, until you’re left with only your most vibrant, vital and visceral writing. See how quickly you can make it happen. Then read it to yourself.  And notice not only how much better the scene becomes,