Easy Steps To Polish Your First Draft

You’ve finished your first draft, and you’ve left it alone for a couple of weeks so that you can get some perspective on it.

I know it’s burning a hole through your desk and you are desperate to hear what people think, but the worst thing you could possibly do at this point is give it to anyone else to read.

Seriously. You need to do more work on it before you let it out into the big wide world. With the smallest amount of effort compared to the labour you have already put in you can make it substantially better.

Get a coffee, and sit down somewhere where you can’t be disturbed. Get a pen. Read your script all in one go.

Make notes in the margins on everything you don’t like.

You are looking for places where, in the cold light of day, it’s clear your script doesn’t do what you hoped it would.

You are looking for things that make you frown, or wince.

Just scribble your thoughts in the margins at that point and move on. Don’t think you have to fix the problem there and then.

And, crucially, (here’s the big money tip) every time you find that you are coming back to the script after your attention has wandered, draw a big line across the page.

There is something very wrong with your story at that point. It could be as simple as a bum line of dialogue, or a clumsy cut between scenes – or it could be something more terminal, like your story completely running out of jeopardy, or a sub plot spiralling out of control – whatever it is, the fact you stopped paying attention to the script at that point is a disaster. The good news is the clue to fixing it will lie somewhere just before that line.

Maybe you’ll have time to work when you get to the end of the script, or maybe it will be another day.

Your job is to go back through and do a mixture of attending to your notes, working out what to do about the places you drew the lines, and this mix of super practical simple stuff:

• Make sure you’re late into every scene (no ‘Hello how are you’ stuff).
• Get of the scene out early. (No goodbyes, or random chat.)
• At the end of every scene tell us where we are going to, and then make sure you take us there next scene. (When I say ‘tell’ I don’t mean you should necessarily do it in dialogue – it’s more like creating some kind of a bang, or sting, at the end of the scene – a kind of mini cliff hanger if you like – that makes us want to find out what happened next. You can’t do this every scene, but it never hurts to be aware it’s a good thing to do.)
• Look at your dialogue, cut all the slack, all the ‘yeah, right, OK but’ fluff that you’ve put in to make it real. (It may be like life, but a script isn’t life, a script is a highly specialised and totally constructed artifice that creates emotion and a simulation of life.)
• Trim the stage directions, cut all the slack. Don’t ever get poetic. Just tell us what happens, as simply as you can.

If you do all that, it shouldn’t take you more than a few big sessions, and your script will be so much better than it was just a few hours before.

NOW it’s time to send it out or get people to comment on it, or do whatever you want to do with it.

Tagged as: dialog, dialogue, polishing, rewriting, screen structure, second draft