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Congratulations! If you've made it this far, then you’ve finished your first draft. You're probably not very happy with what the draft looks like, but that's okay! You got from Fade In to Fade Out, and now you can start the revision process, or you can wait a few months. Stick that script in a drawer, take a break, come back to it with fresh eyes. Work on something else. The more scripts you write, the more experience you're going to build, and the more you’re going to be able to troubleshoot your own work. It's very, very useful. It might be a time to trade out a script with a friend, too, so you can read each other's work and comment on it. Sometimes we get too close to what we're working on and we need somebody else to give us perspective on the changes we want to make.

So my favorite thing to do in this process, in all honesty, is to put the project in the drawer. If it's a spec script that I'm writing, that means I'm writing it for myself, and I'm not actually on deadline to give it to a producer or director, I like to take a step back. I switch gears, I go work on a different project. I give it time to settle and then I look at it with fresh eyes. What if, though, I have to deliver? What if I am under a deadline? Well, in that case, the first thing I do is I take the script back down to outline so that I can troubleshoot it. I go through the steps, and I think again about how I can elevate the beats, how I can stretch the scenes, how I can really build up the emotional reaction in my reader and in my audience. The second thing I really like to focus on is building out, fleshing out the rapport between the antagonist and the protagonist. This is very important, like sometimes when we finish a first draft, there's a bit of a binary opposition between the good guy and the bad guy. Sometimes it can seem as though the protagonist’s way of looking at the world is logical and the antagonist’s way of looking at the world is not.

When the antagonist wakes up in the morning, it's important to remember that he doesn't think there's anything wrong with his way of looking at the world. In fact, he's utterly committed to his vision, and he's utterly committed to his goals. He thinks everybody else is crazy. I'm reminded of what a really great entertainment attorney once told me: never assume that other people are doing something crazy. Assume that they have a completely logical reason in their mind for the way they're acting, and that will help you get to their motivations. It will help you understand how they look at the world.

One of my favorite movies for showing this is probably “Silence of the Lambs.” Hannibal Lecter doesn't think he has a twisted mind. In fact, he is pretty confident that everybody else would enjoy a little fricassee of brain with a nice glass of Chianti. Whew! I mean, I haven't seen that film in forever and it still sticks with me. So, what I’m talking about here is starting to work on the point of view of your different characters, even though the movie you’re writing is probably told from the POV, as we've discussed, of your main character, your protagonist. I want to make sure that you have realistic, believable perspectives for each of your characters. They can't be straw men or straw women. They have to have their own desire lines, whether they’re a secondary character or a main character.

So, in my rewrite, I love to flesh out this aspect of the antagonist and to make sure I create a balance. Ultimately, I want to create that feeling in the story, whether it happens as a line of dialogue or not, where the antagonist almost tells the protagonist that “You're just like me. There's something about you that's inherently just like me. You could join me,” and over the course of the character arc, of course, the protagonist has to learn to have confidence and through action, and through proving herself or himself, to be able to say, “You know what? I could be like you if I made other choices, but I'm nothing like you, and I never will be, because of who I’ve become.”

Each character has a unique point of view that's believable and that really resonates with the story and challenges the protagonist to grow, and in that process of reworking the character, I like to read through everybody's dialogue one character at a time, to make sure the voices are unique and that they’re also uniform within that character’s timeline. There's a whole process to rewriting scripts that we’re not going to worry about in this course, but I'm sure we'll do a future course to get you through that process.

So, congratulations once again. You know, make sure you stay in touch with our community online. We’ll be happy to point you toward somebody to read your script. Join us for a consult if you feel like it can help you get in the right direction for your revisions, but most of all celebrate this moment. It's a great accomplishment. I'm really proud of you and we look forward to continuing the journey!

© SJ Murray, 2018