Everyone knows about editors in movies. An editor takes footage from a movie shoot and works with the director to cut multiple takes into a coherent picture. There’s an Academy Award for Best Film Editing, so names get known. Thelma Schoonmaker has won three Oscars, having edited all of Martin Scorsese’s movies since 1980.

But here’s something many people don’t realize. Thelma Schoonmaker is a picture editor. Well before a film is shot, a story editor works on the script with the writer, and probably the director and creative producer. If it’s a big-budget project, studio executives send notes. In the midst of all this noise, it’s the job of the story editor to help the screenwriter craft the best script possible, just as an editor in publishing helps a writer rewrite a manuscript.

I’m a novelist, but of course I’ve held paying jobs to support my literary habit. This includes editing books and story-editing screenplays, so I can tell you they’re very different beasts. When I’m doing a story edit, I take a visual approach. I edit books more intellectually. 

Yet when I sat down recently to rewrite the first draft of my latest book, I decided to pull out my story-editing chops. I usually write about researching my novels: not just reviewing books, but telling stories about trips to Korean spas and the farthest reaches of Chile, scattering tips along the way.

Now I’d reached another stage in the process, and maybe if I detail my out-of-the-box approach to the rewrite, you’ll find it helpful as well.

The checklist

It started when a friend kindly gave me notes on the novel, and I realized the problems she’d highlighted are common in screenplays, too.

The first involves pacing. My friend thought the novel opened too slowly. Obviously, pacing is crucial in film, and story editors quickly learn how to identify both the problems and solutions. My friend also said the character of the protagonist’s best friend wasn’t landing. This made me think of a screenplay where the writer-director was having trouble getting the female wing-man right. Fixing the wing-woman benefited the film in surprising ways.

To talk about how I did this—and how you can do this—I  want to show you one page of a script. For legal reasons, I can’t show you the scripts of produced films I worked on, either as a screenwriter or story editor. But here’s the first page of a script I wrote in the 2010s that never got made, suffering the common fate of dying in development hell. (A pause as I brood.)

The project is called Patient Zero and—rather presciently, I think—it’s about the first person to bring a new plague to North America, after which it spreads around the world. 

You can see that there are two scenes with clear headings, which I’ve put in boldface. The longer lines narrate the action: the characters and the camera are on the move. Each character’s dialogue is headed by her name and indented on the page. These simple mechanical devices are useful for several reasons, but let’s stick to three.

How fast does the action move?

The first question a story editor asks involves the overall pacing of the film, and here’s a simple trick to identify problems. Leaf through a script. Don’t read, just look at the pages. Do you see dense pages without much white space, meaning little dialogue? That shows the screenwriter is focused on action, and it’s not bad to have a lot of wham-bam going on. But his characters won’t have any personality if they don’t speak.

At the other extreme are scripts with too much white space on the page, meaning they’re mostly dialogue. I tell students about one type of opening I often see in beginner scripts. First the characters sit in the kitchen arguing about money as they debate whether they should rob a bank. Eventually the writer realizes it’s boring to keep them sitting in the kitchen and takes them outside for a walk, where they continue to argue. Arriving back home, they stand in front of the garage, still arguing, until they finally get in the car and drive off to rob the bloody bank. 

How much more interesting would it be if the movie opens on three characters riding uneasily in a car. They’re arguing about money, quickly establishing their personalities. The driver veers when he sees some cops; we’re not sure why. Then they pull up outside a bank, pull on ski masks, pull out their guns and race into the bank, still arguing as they rob it.

In that iteration, dialogue and action are mixed on the page. I like it when I see that.

But when looking at the first few chapters of my manuscript, I saw paragraph and after paragraph marching relentlessly forward with hardly any dialogue. I was too far inside my protagonist’s head, setting up the fact she faces a series of problems and that she keeps retreating instead of confronting them. I’d done this deliberately. I hinted at the trauma she’s experienced, but had decided to tease readers with incremental revelations instead of letting it all out at the beginning. That meant the image those first pages suggested was of waves lapping endlessly on the sand. No wonder my friend found them slow. My initial conception was flawed.

So I did what I advised my screenwriting students. I cut the teasing and made it clear what was going on, revealing my character’s trauma through shorter and more explicit scenes. These had the advantage of echoing her emotional state rather than describing it. 

In the process, I found something interesting. My friend had identified the first five chapters as the problem, saying she’d started getting into the story in the sixth and loved the rest. Once those five chapters had become three, the opening pages of the novel looked like the rest of the manuscript, at least until the action sped up toward the climax. The novel grew tonally consistent and, frankly, more professional.  

Second steps are always the hardest–and the most useful

The next trick I took from story editing involved the scenes themselves. You can see in the sample above that in a screenplay, the scenes are defined explicitly on the page. This makes it easy to follow a core screenwriting maxim: something must change in every scene. 

In big Hollywood spandex movies, a rocket has to crash to earth at the end of each sequence, or someone’s head has to explode, or maybe a galaxy does. In dramatic films, the change is more subtle. Maybe a character learns something about herself, or reveals something, or discovers something about her partner. Maybe she takes a step she’s been avoiding, does something stupid, confronts her boss, runs away, crashes the car. 

It could also be that the audience learns something the protagonist doesn’t get, which is useful in upping tension.

Scenes in a novel aren’t as explicitly defined, but they’re announced by a location change, the opening of a flashback, maybe a line break. Noting where each scene started and ended, I kept asking myself what had changed by the end. If there was nothing—if the scene simply repeated what had gone before—I would either cut it or pull a moment forward from later in the book when my protagonist admitted to her problems. My friend had doggedly read past the first five chapters, but a publishing professional would have bailed long before then. 

Of course, front-end-loading the manuscript meant I had to rewrite scenes later on, since I’d stolen revelations from later chapters. Yet that was a plus. To fill the gaps, I had to dig deeper into my protagonist and my themes. Working through the novel scene by scene, I asked myself what changed here, and here, and here. In the end, I think it left me with a more affecting and complex manuscript. 

Make sure your characters aren’t paper-thin

One last thing. I mentioned a writer-director who needed to work on a secondary character. I was story-editing her low-budget horror movie, and in the early drafts, the wing-woman was only around to give the protagonist someone to talk to. Planning to beef up the character, we used a script software feature to pull out all of the woman’s speeches, printing them out in order so we could identify the arc of her character.

 There was none. 

Seeing this, the writer-director opened a file to create a personality for her wing-woman. This meant giving her an her agenda. What did the woman want? What did she hope to get out of the protagonist’s schemes? Did she want to save her troubled friend or to become her? Most importantly, what conflict did her new agenda cause between them?

Not only did the writer-director’s work deepen the woman’s character, her pushback made the protagonist to go farther. This didn’t just improve the script. It also meant the writer-director was able to attract a very good actress to play the role. In fact, she was so good, the audience was shocked when she was killed.

In novels, it’s more of a slog to isolate a character’s speeches and thoughts, although you can do it by using the Find feature on your software program. In this case, I searched out the scenes in which my protagonist’s best friend appeared, my first reader having found her both unconvincing and unappealing.

I quickly found my problem wasn’t that the best friend lacked an agenda. Instead, I’d done the same thing with her as I’d done with my protagonist, revealing her problems too slowly, so she seemed bland at the beginning of the book. Going to work on those early scenes once again, I gave the best friend a different last name so she would feel new to me, and I could create a brasher personality for her.

 Afterward, I went through the same process with all the other characters. Doing such a meticulous story edit isn’t easy, and the rewrite is never quite finished—especially when you give the second draft of your novel to a few more friends. One pointed out that I had neglected another secondary character during my edit, and he needed more space. Another said there were a couple of places near the end where I’d repeated myself. Flipping through a print-out, I found it was true. There were still places where the paragraphs lapped relentlessly ashore. 

Highlight. Delete. 

Yet editing the novel this way helped immensely, and if you think it might help you, keep these pointers in mind:

• Flip through the manuscript without reading it. Is there more dialogue than you intended? Less? Does the narrative disappear inside a character’s mind, making the pages look claustrophobic? Is the action relentless and impersonal?
• Does something change in each scene? However subtly.
• Does each of your characters, no matter how secondary, have an agenda of their own? One that creates conflict within the story. Or catharsis.

Sneaky bonus tip

Notes are important. You need them, and need to listen to them with an open mind, no matter how perfect you think your manuscript. Agreed to try them. Admit to yourself that they might help.

You also need to reject the notes that don’t work, even if they come from your editor, or your agent, or a studio executive who controls the budget. 

I’ve found it helpful to send these people memos highlighting the notes of theirs I’ve taken, thanking them profusely for their input and making sure to say it’s made the project far better. I also fail to mention the notes I’ve ignored. In my experience, people give so many notes on so many different projects, they can’t remember everything, and won’t realize you haven’t done everything they’ve asked.

Except if we’re talking about a director, but that’s another question.

Top photo credit: Neda Kekil.