Fix This - 12.8.24

When you take the time to really analyze your writing, it's amazing how many opportunities you can find to improve it. Take a look at the excerpt below. It might seem perfectly passable, but upon further review, there are several ways to make it better. 

Can you find them?

The first mistake is in the slug line. Remember, the slug line only tells us three things… 1.) If the scene takes place inside or outside, 2.) where the scene takes place, and 3.) if it’s day or night. It’s not a place for extra details. “Well-appointed” is an extra detail. It describes the room and belongs in the scene description.

Next, we can tell this is the first time Heidi appears in the script because her name is followed by a brief character description. When we meet a new character, their name should be in ALL CAPS.

Moving on, we see that “GLASS OF WINE” has been written in all caps. There’s no need to put props in all caps, unless they’re extremely important. For example, if we saw Franz put poison in the wine in an earlier scene, the writer might choose to use all caps here to draw our attention to the wine glass to remind us that, oh yeah, there’s poison in there!

In this case, the glass of wine was just a glass of wine. No needs for the caps.

What else would you improve?

If we were writing this scene, we would replace “looks” with something stronger. “Looks” is on our 7 Deadly Sins of Writing List as a word that you can usually remove or replace in your writing to improve it. (If you don’t have a copy of the list, you can download it for free HERE.)

See how the sentence is better when you replace that word?

One more change to go!

In Heidi’s last line of dialogue, there’s another mistake with caps. When dialogue is written in all caps, it tells the actor that the character is supposed to yell that line.

Here, the writer probably intended for the actor to emphasize “exactly”, not yell it. The correct way to format this is to underline the word you want to emphasize. Be careful, however, not to use too much underlining in your script because it can frustrate your actors. Use it sparingly when you really need it.

If you want help getting your script in shape, send it to us for professional script notes. In addition to suggestions for how to improve your writing, we’ll do a deep dive on your story, characters, structure, scenes, and dialogue.