When To Rewrite (and When Not To)
December 4th, 2006 by screenwriterguy
Any salt-worthy writer knows the value of another pair of eyes to go over his screenplay. Building a world and a group of people and a journey is a huge task, and the best of us can lose perspective. There comes a point where you need feedback. You have your wonderful story in your head, and you need to test whether it’s the same as the one you’ve put on paper.
Fortunately, there is no shortage of people out there with opinions. Getting someone to provide a useful opinion on your script is not like, say, finding a useful opinion on your doctoral dissertation on French impressionists. Most people watch movies and television. Even readers with no background who protest their inexpertise can be very valuable to you if you guide them with questions about whether this thing worked or that thing. Hopefully, you can build a set of people you can trust to be supportive of your work while still giving you honest feedback. And if you don’t have a writing partner or writer’s group or really wise spouse to turn to, there is of course no shortage of people who will provide you with feedback for a fee.
The question becomes what do you do when the inevitable occurs, and you get helpful advice from someone you trust… but completely disagree with a particular suggestion.
If someone isn’t reacting the way you hoped, you’d best examine why. In my opinion, the best response to ANY note is, “I’ll take a look at that.” And you should mean it. Take an honest look at every opinion your reader has gone to the trouble to express. (It probably represents several suggestions that s/he didn’t suggest.) There’s nothing worse than a writer who argues with someone who has done the favor of reading a script, defending that the writer was trying to do this or that. It failed to work for one person. That means you should think twice about whether you think it might fail with someone else.
Of course, ultimately I feel one must be honest to one’s own vision, yet remember that this is an art form intended eventually for an audience. You want to execute your idea your way, but you are only half of the communication that is storytelling.
What is my big benchmark that something needs work? Hearing the same thing from more than one person, or especially several people. If many of your trusted readers all have the same problem with your script and you choose to do it your way anyway, you’re straying from integrity to arrogance.
Ultimately, though, there’s only one thing that gives another person the right to insist you change your script. And that’s if they’re paying you.
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