One of the great joys in a writer's life: You've just written FADE OUT, THE END, on your first (some would call it "puke") draft. You pop the cork on the Veuve Cliquot, spread the Beluga on the cracker, and light up the Cohiba. The writer's life is grand, you think. I'm gonna turn in these 110 pages of 20 lb. bond for a stack of Benjamins and take a slow boat to Cannes while they film my ouvre.
Maybe, if you're Shane Black and they're waiting for the Lethal Weapon 6 script. But for most of us, it's just a stage on the way to getting ready to show the script around. Sweet moment to be sure. But not the pay day moment we're looking towards. For that moment, we've got a lot of drafts to do – as many as 25 according to an informal poll I took at a Writers Guild of America conference on rewriting a couple of years ago.
TWENTY-FIVE? Are you nuts?
Well, I'm a writer, aren't I? Okay, twenty-five is how many it takes to get it to the sound stage. It's more like eight or ten to get it to your agent or manager, and at least three or four to get it to your coterie of trusted advisors.
If you're like me, and most of us are in this aspect, you think the first draft is pretty damn good and ready to hand off to the person who's going to sell it for you. But we're wrong. I've never read a first draft, not even my own, that didn't need work (I can tell you, sight unseen, that most first drafts can be cut by 10%. Except mine, which need 10% more.) That pretty much goes for the second and third drafts, too. And sometimes the 24th draft. So how do you know when you've done enough drafts, when the script is ready to go out into the world on its own and take its first steps?
When you think it's the best you can do at this moment in time.
And how do you know when that is? You go through the eight pass check list. Here it is:
1. Read for structure. Make sure your seven points are fully realized and balanced in terms of page length. Make sure your scenes have a beginning, middle, and end. What are the seven points? Briefly, they are the basic superstructure of your script.
a. Ordinary life - getting to know who the central character is and what his issue (flaw) is.
b. The inciting incident - Something happens to your protagonist that will change his life forever.
c. End of act one - when your character decides on a course of action in order to deal with whatever the inciting incident brought up.
d. Midpoint or turning point. Yes, this does happen right around the middle wherein the action takes a sudden and new unexpected direction. The goal may change. The central character may realize what his flaw is. His true needs become more important than what he wants.
e. The low point - end of the second act. The all-is-lost point in terms of the goal.
f. The final challenge. The final barrier that your character must overcome in order to reach his goal. The last, biggest battle.
g. The return to (the now changed forever) normal life. Two or three pages to show us that life goes on and that our character has triumphed and changed. (For a more in-depth discussion of these points with examples, please see my book, Rewrite: A Step-by-Step Guide to Strengthen Structure, Characters, and Drama in your Screenplay.)
