Is what you think is there, there?

Once you have a draft, you have to go through every scene and ask yourself, with brutal honesty, “I know what happens in this scene, but that’s because I wrote it. Does someone who has no idea what is going on have the exact same idea I do about what’s going on?”

Just because you know what happens doesn’t mean a reader is going to know what happens. And remember, for your movie to get made, your script has to go through a lot of readers—agents, managers, producers, directors, talent, editors, etc. Every single one of those people has to understand the story so that they can make a movie that the audience will also understand.

This is why the information must be on the page. It’s fine for you to know that a character acts the way she does because of her relationship with her father when she was a child, but if you want the audience to know that, you must be able to physically point to that information in your script. If it’s not in ink, it’s just in your head. If it’s just in your head, it is not in your reader’s head.

You have to be ruthless. You have to figure out a way to remove your writer’s hat and put on your director’s hat, or, more importantly, your editor’s hat. You must get yourself in the mindset of your editor, sneering, saying, “What you thought was in the script, isn’t in the script. What story are you gonna tell with this footage?”

If you show a character running in one scene and, in the next, he enters his apartment… That is going to tell us that he ran all the way to the apartment. The next, perhaps unintended meaning, is that the apartment is very close to the warehouse. When, in fact, they’re twenty miles apart… That means you need to write an in-between scene of him walking, exhausted, down the sidewalk.

You are going from your mind to the page to the reader’s mind to the audience’s mind. A very crooked journey, fraught with peril. Easy for us to say. Hard for you to do.

But, you have to do it. You have to exercise rigor in the rewriting process to make certain that when the reader reads it, the reader is going to be in your head.

The reader is going to make meaning from what you give them. By reading what’s on the page, they cannot figure out what is in your head unless you tell them the correct story, the correct images, in the correct order.

This is brutally difficult to do, but, if you keep yourself aware of the problem, you can solve it.