In the Q&A after last week’s Conflict workshop — available here if you missed it — the topic of rewriting strategies came up and inspired me to send today’s article. And since I’ve been thinking about making November’s workshop a practical guide to creating a rewrite plan, I’d love to hear if that’s something you’d be interested in, or if there are other screenwriting-related topics you’d like to see us cover. 😊

A master plan for tackling your next rewrite

Writing a first draft by the seat of your pants works for a lot of writers, but rewriting goes better when you have a plan.

What happens when you don’t have a plan? It often ends up in:

• trying to do too much at once and getting lost in the weeds,
• writing page after page of new material that doesn’t address the screenplay’s existing issues (or worse, exacerbates them),
• or trying to “fix it with a line of dialogue” when the solution actually requires a more in-depth or holistic approach.

Instead, make your rewrite less stressful and more effective by taking a strategic approach.

A 4-step rewrite master plan

Sometimes you’re working on a tight deadline or under other less-than-ideal conditions, and your rewriting process will be subject to those demands. But in general an effective rewrite would look something like this:

1. Rest: Give yourself time away from your draft to gain perspective.
2. Analyze: Once you have fresh eyes, read the draft to determine what’s working and what needs work.
3. Prioritize: Organize the results of your analysis into a plan of action.
4. Revise: Implement the changes you’ve decided on, one layer at a time.

That’s the basic order of operations. How about a few additional tips for making each step work for you?

1. Rest

The point of a rest period is to allow you to gain some perspective on what you’ve written before you start making any changes. It’s difficult to judge your own writing at all, and even harder when you’re still in the throes of the writing experience. As one of my former writing teachers used to say, “It’s impossible to read the label from inside the bottle.”

With time you gain distance, perspective, and the ability to see what you’ve actually put on the page (not just what you think is there). And that’s very helpful when you’re deciding what changes to make.

So, during the rest period, try to completely step away from this particular screenplay for a while. You can write other things in the meantime, if you want to. Or spend the time refilling your well in other ways. Plus, let's be honest, you probably need to catch up on all the things you’ve put off while you were focused on writing.

How long should a rest period be? There isn't one correct answer here. If you’re on a deadline you may only be able to take a few days off. If you can manage it, several weeks or a month can be very clarifying.

One caveat I’ll add: if you’re stepping away from writing completely during your rest, it might be harder to come back to it. If you can maintain your writing habit in some way — whether that’s working on a different project, brainstorming story ideas, or even journaling each day — that can make re-entry much easier when the time comes.

2. Analyze

As I alluded to above, one of the toughest aspects of rewriting is simply understanding what you’ve actually written, as opposed to what you think you’ve written, or what you intended to write.

Perhaps your protagonist accidentally took a back seat in this draft, leaving the script without a real main character. Maybe that scene you meant to have play out as a tense, stakes-raising Midpoint, instead drags on the page and ultimately just feels boring. Or, maybe the snappy dialogue style you tried out actually sounds choppy and unnatural.

Don’t worry, we’ve all been there.

And it’s only with some distance that you’ll be able to make those assessments. So after you’ve had a restful break, it’s time to read your screenplay and analyze what’s on the page. And you’ll want to break this into two separate phases: read, then interpret.

Here are some guidelines to focus your efforts:

1. Plan to read through the whole script in one sitting.
2. Mark any important reactions as you go, but do not interrupt the read to write out full notes or fixes right now.
3. When you’ve finished the read, it's time to analyze. Try to summarize your overall thoughts and feelings about the state of the script. Then go back to your flagged reactions and pinpoint what you were feeling and what’s causing that reaction. What’s the root problem? What changes would address it?

In earlier drafts, the notes you come up with will likely revolve around big-picture issues and story foundation elements. If you’re further along in the process and looking at the script more granularly, you may have more notes about individual scenes, dialogue, pacing, etc.

What to flag while you’re reading

It’s helpful to flag your reactions to the script in the moment, but without pulling yourself away from the read. Use a shorthand that will allow you to recall what you were feeling. You want to remember both the good and the bad, where the script is working and where it needs work. When you’re ready to analyze, these reactions will lead you to specific notes and inform your rewrite plan.

If this feels overwhelming, start by paying attention to what I call the “reader red flags”: boredom and frustration.

As you’re reading, you’ll simply mark anywhere you find yourself feeling either of these things. After the read you can look more closely at those flags and determine what brought about those reactions. (Remember, read/react first, analyze the cause of the reaction later.)

Boredom often comes from an overly predictable story, a lack of conflict and/or stakes, lack of urgency, or a too-slow pace. Frustration often comes from confusion over what’s happening or why it’s happening, a lack of direction in the plot, or characters that don’t behave in logical ways.

Who else should read your script?

Whether you have other people read your screenplay at this point is completely up to you. You may feel like you can already see several things that need work, and you don’t need an outside opinion at the moment. Or, you may feel like even after a rest period you’re still too close to the script to see what’s working or not.

Even if you have a good handle on the changes you want to make, sometimes corroborating your reactions and/or discussing your thoughts can help you gain clarity on the changes needed, focus in on what’s most important, and help you come up with new solutions.

So yes, other readers can be helpful – and I’m including both paid consultants like myself, as well as friends you can talk into reading your script – but you certainly don’t have to get outside opinions if they wouldn’t be helpful to you right now.

If you do decide to seek another opinion on your draft, two factors to consider:

• Choose your readers wisely. Bad notes can be worse than no notes.
• Make sure your readers know what you want from them. Are you looking for specific constructive criticism, simply some encouragement to help you keep going, or something else altogether?

If your reader is a professional, it’s likely you hired them for the express purpose of getting detailed feedback, of course. In that case you don’t need to set forth reading guidelines. But, at least for myself, I always welcome specific questions or topics that the writer wants to make sure to discuss, in addition to my analysis of the script.

>> If you’d like to work with me, here’s how.​

3. Prioritize

Once you’ve collected and analyzed the feedback, it’s time to organize the notes and make a plan.

You’ll need to decide what you want to address, and then prioritize the work so that you’re not trying to do everything at once. Plan to implement changes over several passes, and keep in mind that your feelings about the script and what needs to be done may even change before you get to the lower-priority notes.

That’s why we prioritize. We want to make sure you’re doing the things that are the most foundational and/or important first, while you continue to evaluate the script’s needs going forward.

For example, maybe your list of notes includes some superficial things, like lightening up the page density and clarifying some scene description, as well as a bunch of notes about the characters: right now there are too many and they’re hard to keep straight.

For the next draft of your script, that cluster of character-related notes is more important than wordsmithing, so your rewrite plan will focus on implementing those changes. You've decided to combine two supporting characters into one, rewrite another supporting character with a more distinct point of view, and do a dialogue pass for the protagonist and antagonist. In a later pass you can address the more superficial notes if you decide it's still necessary.

And even though you're going to focus just on the character fixes for now, it's still too much to handle all in one go. You'll want to spread those revisions out over a series of separate passes.

4. Revise

You have your plan. You know what you’re aiming to accomplish and how you’ll go about it. All that’s left now is actually doing it.

At this point you may be tempted to open up your Final Draft doc and start editing and moving things around. But, depending on the notes you're planning to implement, you may find it more helpful to start with your outline, or even notecards.

If that's the case, you'll probably want to make a new outline or set of cards based on the current draft of the script first.

Seeing the beats of your current story iteration all listed out can give you additional clarity about what’s working or not. You can then revise your outline with your prioritized changes, which is a quick way to try out bigger, foundational, or structural revisions before you spend time rewriting pages. And your new outline will be your map as you make the changes to your screenplay.

A final note: remember that rewriting isn’t always a linear process. At times you may feel like you’re moving in the wrong direction, or that you’ve wasted time on certain revisions that later you’ll end up changing again. But often those wrong turns are the very reason we discover the right turns, so be gentle with yourself as you make your way toward your finished screenplay.

Until next time,

Naomi