An article for writers and filmmakers.... Enjoy!


Rewriting your Screenplay: The Road to your Audience
By Gordy Hoffman
 
The promise of the rewrite is very sweet. I have collected evidence that the
more authentic the labor put into rewriting your screenplay, the greater the
reward, and the reward is high, for whatever lovely, wonderful moments you
might have discovered in the frightening process of plowing through the first
draft, those moments, those seeds, are only seeds, and they only fulfill their
destiny as giant, involving scenes in the movie that screens before people.  So
if I shortcut my revision, I will miss the prize, pure and simple.
 
The process of rewriting is recreating. I need to make a contract with myself
to make room in every moment of my writing for the imaginative magic of
inspiration, that flash of brilliance which some call talent, the muse, God, or
desperation, to deliver something that did not exist just a second before, but
now lives forever, like a huge white rabbit suddenly from a hat.  This usually
happens when my fingers are on the keyboard and there’s white below from where
I
’m typing, and I have no idea where I’m going. Or if I have some idea, I
don’
t have the answer, but I trust and that’s it.
 
Rewriting is technically every change you make to your draft. There, I said
it, so now you can’t come back and argue with me about what you think a
rewrite
is. But now I will tell you what rewriting really is, or what it really is
not.  Rewriting is not cutting and pasting. It’s not reading through your
draft
on your computer screen and changing words. It’s not pushing your cursor down
the page, highlighting text and deleting it. I think this is called editing or
deleting or garbage time or easy on the damn brain, but it’s not called
rewriting over in the bust your ass capital of screenplay planet.
 
Rewriting is almost starting completely over. It’s almost accepting that you
have nothing after celebrating like you won your tenth super bowl simply by
typing the end and poking two brass fasteners through a pile of paper. Rewriting
is taking that pile of paper, plopping it beside you where you can see it
without a lot of movement of the head, and copying it over with an industrious
attitude.
 
Okay, basically if you open a new file and name it second draft, or seventh,
or whatever, lie all you want, but if you simply copy it over and the only
thing that gets changed is the things that make you physically jerk in your
chair, then you are not rewriting with an industrious attitude. An industrious
attitude can mean a lot of things, I will probably call it something else next
week, but it simply means you are open to work, and with a rewrite, the premise
to work is the belief your script needs work. If you can’t see much wrong, how
can it need a lot of work, and how is the rewrite going to work? It won’t. So
make sure you have an open bent, and start typing it over.
 
What happens? Well, if you’ve never done it, I’m not gonna tell you. A lot
of screenwriters won’t even admit it they’ve never done it, because it
breaks
your neck. If you have done it, it’s almost time we did it again. Either way,
go.
 
Now, how do I find out what’s broken? It’s not all on one page, and it’s
hard to see the big picture of the awful thing. Well, this isn’t a book, this
is
just a short essay, so here’s a short list of tools to get yourself into and
ready for your rewrite.
 
First, you got ask yourself, what’s the story, or more specifically, what are
the stories? I usually make up a list of sentences that start with “The story
of…..” and fill in the blanks. What are the stories that are emerging from
your current draft? What does your spirit want to tell versus what your poor
brain thought you were going to do back in the coffee shop? You might find the
list is long, and that’s a problem, too. There’s usually a main one, maybe
one
close behind, then a few tiny sweet ones. There is your family of stories.
There they are. Now. How are you treating them?
 
This is where you can make some kind of a chart. Like a spreadsheet or
something. Or the back of a dry cleaning receipt will do. Divide up your script
into
the beginning, act one, act two, act three, and the finish. By the way, I
know there’s all sorts of act divisions. Modify my directions at your will.
It’s
fine. So within this chart you will pencil in the beats that exist within the
current layout of your script. When you’re done charting the arcs of your
family of stories, you will undoubtedly find HOLES. Wow. Nothing’s there.
Didn’t
see that before. Okay, you better put something in there.

Let’s say you got your chart pretty full, in fact, it looks like the stories
of your movie have something resembling a beginning, middle and end. Now what
you need is to make every scene as good as your best scene. Yeah, terrible
news. How do you determine this? Grade your scenes. Some scenes might get an A.
Others maybe a B. Give your work an F or two. Once you do this, you will know
what scenes are functioning as placeholders and what are moneymakers. In the
end, rewriting is making everything the most special ever. Anything short, and
you have more rewriting to do.  Unless you can live with an uneven ride. But
this is a rewriting article, not a give up article.
 
Finally, a reminder. Screenwriting becomes artful when compression arrives.
Shorten your everything. All dialogue and description is representative of this
life traveled through a living soul. Uh, that’s you. A screenplay is just
another poem, it’s just another small bit resembling something we recognize as
human beings. Seven Samurai is a very short movie compared to what happens in a
life, even shorter stacked against forever. But it lives beyond forever,
doesn’
t it?
 

Article URL:
http://www.bluecatscreenplay.com/About/rewriting_your_screenplay.php
 
About the Author
Winner of the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the Sundance Film Festival
for LOVE LIZA, Gordy Hoffman has written and directed three digital shorts for
Fox Searchlight. He made his feature directorial debut with his script, A COAT
OF SNOW, which world premiered at the 2005 Locarno International Film
Festival. He is also the founder of the BlueCat Screenplay Competition.
Dedicated to
develop and celebrate the undiscovered screenwriter, BlueCat provides written
screenplay analysis on every script entered. In addition, Gordy acts as a
script consultant for screenwriters, offering personalized feedback through his
consultation service, www.screenplaynotes.com. For more articles by Gordy on
screenwriting, visit www.bluecatscreenplay.com.

Copyright © 2006 BlueCat Screenplay Competition


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