Before you go into the buyer-jungle, it is great to get supportive critiques that will help you make your story points as clear as possible, weed out areas of confusion, make your characters more interesting and to help delete out excessive length. Objective readers can help you find the best strengths of your story and trim away the fat so you are just down to the muscles. This can be a FUN process! You already have achieved the greatest accomplishment of completing an entire draft. You cannot lose this work, and now you are playing with it to sharpen it, tighten it, and make it stronger. I call the first draft the “Lewis and Clark” which should be viewed as an uncritical journey to the proverbial coast, just like the American adventurers. When you get to the coast, the next draft is about putting the freeway through for the readers to come – that is the draft that will probably sell.
One of the biggest problems in first draft film script writing is the writer may not have linked all of his or her plot ideas together in a way that a casual reader needs to successfully connect the dots. It is amazing how damaging to your success a simple fact or linking-idea being missed by the reader can cause your script to fail. We have seen finished projects and movies leap up in their test scores when one of these simple logic obstacles was repaired. I liken it to stepping stones across a stream: if a stone is missing and your audience or reader falls in and gets wet, unless you are very lucky, they don’t recover by the end of the story. It is important, therefore, to make sure that without losing your tone, style and purpose, that the story makes basic sense to the reader. In Hollywood some people go home with as many as ten scripts that they are supposed to read on a weekend. They will not think kindly of you if they have to fight to understand your story. Clarity is valuable and sometimes what is obvious to us can be obscure to others, which is why it is important to share and tweak your scripts with non-buyers before submitting them to the people who can make a difference in your life by buying them.
The last great secret of writing a feature film script that sells is to read it like a stranger and lay it out so that it is most easy on the eye to read. View your script as a series of visual structures. Break up large, dense descriptions and do your best to make the words and ideas flow as easily as possible.
I go into this in much more detail in my book, Riding the Alligator, where I explain simple techniques for how you can see your script with fresh eyes and quickly accomplish the goal of editing and tightening for effect.
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If you found this article helpful you might like to visit http://www.RidingtheAlligator.com where you’ll find more free resources about film script writing to help you expand your screenwriting skills.
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