Good morning, fellow artists! Welcome to another exciting edition of my weekly Hollywood blog. Last week, I shared the wonderful news that I finished rewriting Act One of my latest feature film script. Thanks to the coverage notes I received from my Slamdance Screenplay Clinic consultation, I was able to achieve this milestone. In the days since, I have moved into the first half of Act Two to continue applying those notes to this next set of rewrites.
Knowing that Act Two is the belly of the beast of a script, I am prepared to move with patience and intention. For example, there were two scenes that recently gave me a little run for my money. In the first scene, the coverage notes asked me to provide a clearer explanation of the timeline and steps needed for the team to win the championship. The second scene required the coach to go into greater detail about one of those specific steps. With both scenes, I found myself writing and deleting several times because I wanted them to be as clear as possible. I moved paragraphs around and stacked up a few variations of the coach’s speech side-by-side to see which one was the strongest. I looked up definitions to find the perfect words, deleted dialogue, and read the scenes out loud. I even improvised new dialogue on the spot to nail what these two scenes were really about. Finally, things clicked, I gained clarity, and the scenes flowed much better!
I was also able to drop in the beginnings of two subplots, which was incredibly satisfying. At the same time, I realized that the script length increased by five pages. I have to remind myself that it’s okay—this is just part of the rewriting process. If anything, it’s better to have extra pages to cut down later than to fall short. It’s also likely that as I move onto more scenes, I will naturally delete things that decrease the page count. I should be prepared for the number to fluctuate as I continue. Ultimately, I won’t know my final page count until I finish this second draft, but I will be ready to edit appropriately to strengthen the story and bring the script to a manageable length.
See you next week!
Chasing The George 