The Rewrite Plan

Here is a strategy for avoiding what hobbles so many aspiring screenwriters - writing in circles. What happens is that writers start rewriting without a plan or direction – they just start tweaking pages, starting on page one and then going forward. It’s like taking a small hammer and chipping away at the interior beams, walls and supports of your building before taking a long hard look at the blueprint. Before long you find yourself in a cloud of sheetrock dust - whoops, that was a load-bearing wall. When jumping into a rewrite it is crucial to have a plan and a focus. Do not tweak ad infinitum. The results are never good.

So here’s what the Wave-inatrix recommends to avoid this Wagnerian cycle of doom:

Get feedback
Group the notes by category and commonality
Review your premise
Breakdown the script by sequences
Review and rewrite each sequence, correcting the elements as needed

You’ve written your first draft. You get feedback - from more than one intelligent, supportive peer or perhaps from one professional you really trust and respect. Know this: no matter what feedback you get and how you go about implementing it, expect that at least 50% of your script will either be tossed or rewritten. That number is actually on the low side. But expect it. Writing IS rewriting.

Next, look at the notes and group the comments by element:

Premise
Character
Dialogue
Antagonist
Subplots
Ancillary characters
Narrative
Structure
Logic/world
Theme
Set up
Resolution

What do your notes have in common? Did everybody complain about the arc of your main character? All right, then it’s probably a problem. Did everybody uniformly comment about logic or structure? Ditto. Did somebody complain about theme but nobody else did? Okay then they are clearly a jackass. The Wave-inatrix kids. If you have a solitary note that nobody else mentioned, go with your writer's gut - does it ping at all? Or does it feel way off base? Remember, always be in service to your story, not your ego. Use every single note to improve your script. If you must disregard the note, disregard it after at least some thought.

Now re-examine your premise full stop. You likee? It’s working? Are the problematic elements you’ve organized connected to the premise? Or to the execution of the premise? If it’s the premise, you habba bigger problem than you think. This means you literally need to go back to the premise and work with it until you have a great one. You might have to get rid of a whole lot of pages. Maybe you need to kill some darlings.

The Wave-inatrix must pause here to emphasize that there is not one page that you wrote that was a waste of time. Delete pages for the greater good but recognize that all writing is an exercise for you. Sometimes what isn’t working is more instructive than what is. Be unafraid, Rouge Wavers. But we digress.

You have gotten feedback, you have organized the notes by element looking for commonalities. Now it’s time to take action. But what’s this – you don’t have an outline to refer to?

A stupid outline? Why? Because your outline gives you a bird’s eye view of your script. The outline is the blueprint, the pages are the execution of that blue print. Looking at your outline, you can much more easily locate and pinpoint the various elements of your script.

Say you didn’t listen to the Wave-inatrix, say you just up and wrote the script and don’t have an outline or 12 sequence narrative. Firstly, no pudding for dessert, and secondly, it’s not too late.

Get out a blank piece of paper and simply describe in about 2 or 3 sentences, what happens every ten pages. This doesn’t have to be poetic, you’re simply creating a road-map of your script. You are essentially creating what some writers call a “beat sheet”.

Now, return to the list of problematic elements according to your feedback. Then look at your outline. If one of the issues was with set up, go to your first two sequences. Because that’s where set up is rooted. If your problem was with character arc, look at each sequence and literally chart your character’s arc, up, down, forward and back. Use colored pens. Do whatever you need to do. This is not a test. But you are striving to take a bird’s eye view and you are striving to stay organized. Do not fall prey to the temptation to just go straight to page 17 and fix that cool dream-sequence. No. Handslap. Stay focused.

Rewrite your script every ten pages at a time. Review each sequence for a beginning, middle and end. View each ten pages as a mini-movie. Does the logic add up in that ten pages? How about the next ten pages relative to the first ten? Is your character changing from one sequence to the next?

Because everything in scripts is incremental, breaking your material down into sequences is a much simpler approach than trying to do your rewrite from page one on without a focused map of just where the issues are.

No rewrite, no matter how focused and organized is perfect. Sometimes in rewrite you’ll unearth totally unexpected ideas and directions. What you don’t want to do is to write different scripts each time you write, adding layer after layer until you have an unrecognizable goulash that bores you – and then you quit. And you’ve got scriptus interruptus again. Stay focused, stay organized and break your script down into manageable sequences. Whether that’s every ten pages, every five, every eight – whatever works for you, which is the message that, the Wave-inatrix hopes, underlies all of this malarkey. It’s what works for YOU. But if you’ve had trouble staying on course with your rewrites, it’s certainly worth giving this method a try.

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