Fix This - 11.17.24
There are infinite ways to write the same scene, but some ways are better than others. As a screenwriter, your goal is to describe what's happening in a way that's clear, concise, and compelling.
Take a look at the scene below. How would you improve it?
There are a lot of way to make this scene better. Your answer might be slightly different, but we’ll walk you through how we would approach it…
Let’s start with the lowest hanging fruit… spelling errors. A few spelling errors might seem like a no big deal, but don’t be fooled. For one thing, they’re distracting to the reader. You don’t want to do anything that’s going to pull a reader out of your story. Secondly, you’re a writer, you should be good at spelling. Mistakes make you look lazy and like you don’t care. Not winning qualities.
The tricky part about the mistakes in this scene is they’re not actually spelled wrong. They’re real words, which means your spell check won’t flag them. Don’t rely on your spell check to catch all your errors. Proofread, proofread, proofread.
In this scene, “isles” and “peaks” should be “aisles” and “peeks.” (Btw, peaks / peeks / piques is by far one of the most common mix ups we see in scripts, so play close attention to that one.)
Spelling and grammar mistakes are the easy part. Let’s get into the good stuff.
Looking at this paragraph, the first thing we notice is it’s way too long. You want to avoid big chunks of writing like this because they can feel overwhelming to a reader. White space on the page is your friend. A good rule of thumb is to try to have no more than four lines per paragraph. This one has twice that many, so we need to tighten the writing and break up the paragraph. Here are our suggestions…
First, do we need to see Sally walk into the grocery store or can we start with her already in the bakery? In most instances, we don’t need to see characters go from Point A to Point B. That’s called Burning Shoe Leather. We talk about it in more detail in Screenwriting Essentials, but for now, let’s agree we can cut that part.
It’s a good idea to give a brief description of the setting at the beginning of the scene, so we’ll move and rewrite the existing sentences to be more concise.
If it’s absolutely critical to the story to know that Sally’s grocery list is written on the back of a crumpled receipt, we’d leave that in. In this case, it wasn’t, so we can streamline the details.
To keep the paragraph from being long and overwhelming, we’ll also break it into two separate paragraphs. The first one sets the scene, the second one gets us into the action.
Even without reading the words, see how much better the shorter paragraphs look on the page? The writing itself is also tighter and moves the story along more efficiently.
Two more changes to go!
Here’s the first one… When Sally’s phone rings, it’s a sound effect. Sound effects need to be written in ALL CAPS. Easy peasy.
Once you’ve made that change, there’s just one final suggestion we’d make to improve this scene.
Can you spot it?
If you’ve been watching our Instagram tips, you might have seen our video about orphan words. Orphan words are single words that end up on lines all by themselves. In the scene above, “annoyed” is an orphan. Because space in a script is limited, you want to avoid dedicating an entire line to one measly word. We’ve cut pages out of scripts just by getting rid of orphan words.
It’s not always possible to get rid of them, but it’s worth taking a look. In this scene, “ignores the call” and “tosses her phone in her purse” tell us basically the same thing. If we see Sally toss her phone in her purse, we understand she’s ignored the call. You don’t need to tell us the same thing twice. By cutting the beginning of the sentence, you also get rid of the orphan and save a line in your script.
Did you have other ideas for improving this scene? We’d love to hear them!
And if you want help getting your script in shape, send it to us for professional script notes. We’ll help you identify what’s working and what needs work to take your screenplay to the next level.