March 20, 2013
Story Editing Tip
During rewrites, go through your script and make sure at least one thing changes in every scene, and that it feeds your story. Maybe a bomb explodes, shredding expectations. Maybe one character loses power over another, whether she’s a mother confronting her daughter or a sergeant bellowing at a recruit. An image we’ve seen before morphs into its opposite. A character learns something; the audience learns something. We expect the car to go straight and it hangs a sharp left. In too many early drafts, the script reads like an old magazine in a dentist’s office. No news.