You’re finished! After several drafts, you’ve ironed out all the plot glitches, you’ve developed the characters and their relationships to their potential, and you’ve milked the climax so that every beat is fraught with tension, resulting in a powerful ending. You’re ready to send the script out to agents and producers.
But wait -- not so fast. These few final steps can make the difference between a flawed diamond and a polished gem.
1) Examine each scene to determine if you can cut into it later or cut out of it earlier. What happens if you cut the first two or three lines of dialogue? Is the meaning of the scene still clear? Does the scene now have more energy? Cutting the last couple of lines and/or beats of action also might speed up the pace.
2) Look for large chunks of description. Busy readers and executives are likely to skip over long paragraphs and may miss important action as a result. If you have a paragraph of description that is over five or six lines long, then either cut it down or break it into separate paragraphs. The more “white space” you have on a page, the faster the script will move. You can set off important moments of action by using boldface or underlining. Just make sure you don’t overuse this device or it will cease to stand out.
3) Because readers and executives often have several scripts to read a night, they may only read the dialogue once they get a sense of the story. For this reason, it is worth reading through your script once reading only the dialogue. If any key beats are missing or unclear, consider indicating them in the dialogue.
4) Emphasis on white space and the importance of dialogue does not mean that your script should be all dialogue. Dialogue-heavy scripts feel talky and/or stagy. If you have a scene of dialogue that goes on for more than a page, break it up with a few short lines of action, indicating what we are seeing on screen. What are the characters doing? How are they using their environment?
Also, look for ways to cut the dialogue down. Do the characters repeat themselves? Do they make long-winded statements when one or two brief sentences will do? In general, unless a character is telling a story, no line of dialogue should be more than four or five lines on the page. If it is, it is likely that the meat of the message is in the last one or two sentences, and the rest is just build-up. What the character is saying will have a lot more impact on the reader if it is not buried inside filler. Remember that film is a visual medium. Memorable dialogue from films tends to be concise, directly to the point, and of key importance in the scene.
One easy way to immediately sharpen the dialogue is to go through and cut out lead-in words like “Well,” “But,” and “Oh.” These words can serve a purpose, but writers tend to overuse them, and they can mute the impact of an important line. Also, cut any unnecessary parenthetical adjectives in your dialogue. Most of the time, the tone of the line is clear from the words themselves.
5) Read your script aloud to yourself. This will help you catch dialogue that drags or that trips up the tongue. It will also help you catch repetitive phrases and typos you might have missed.
6) ALWAYS perform a spell check and grammar check. If there are words you often confuse (such as “its” and “it’s”) that a spellchecker would not catch, then perform a search for each of those words, in order to double-check that you have them right. (Thanks to client Rich Lucas for this excellent tip.) If you are someone who is not detail-oriented, then hire a proofreader or ask a detail-oriented friend to read through the script for you for one last check.
As you complete these tasks, you might find yourself tweaking your plot and characterizations here and there, which is a great side effect of this kind of final read-through. Your story will be smoother, sharper, and more professional as a result.
