Fresh Eyes Are Good For Your Screenplay

You did it. You finished a draft of your script. And you know better than to call it finished. It’s time to revise. But there’s a problem: You’re the least qualified person to look it over right now. You’ve spent too much time with it. You look it over, up, down, left, right and it’s fine.

It really isn’t fine.

The best thing to do in this situation, fellow writers, is to hand your screenplay off to someone else. Give it to someone whose opinion you trust, who won’t run off with your baby. It can be difficult to let someone who isn’t you read your recently finished screenplay. But despite your instincts to do otherwise, letting a trusted pair of fresh eyes look over your screenplay can do wonders for it.

For starters, their fresh eyes will detect typos you didn’t catch in your once-over. If they weren’t there to tell you that you mixed up your “there, they’re, and theirs,” or that several words you meant to make plural were singular, your script would be very amateurish.

We instinctually miss errors on a page, especially if we put them there ourselves and know what we mean for them to say. So a different pair of eyes will catch your mistakes for you, allowing you to rectify them. That’s why editing and proofreading are salaried positions. Take advantage of the fact that you know people who will give you basic help for free.

The person, or people, you allow to look at your screenplay will also point out which parts don’t make sense. Invariably, something always runs amiss in scripts and the writer is hardly ever the one to see it. Again, writers mainly write their drafts to get the story ideas out of their heads and onto a page. But in doing so, writers forget to put down entire words, action lines, scene headings, etc.

So a person who isn’t as wholly knowledgeable about the screenplay will notice when things in it don’t make sense and can effectively let the writer in on their confusion. It’s important for the writer to fix those mistakes because if one person notices it, everyone else will notice it. In addition to basic grammar and essential words being missing, a friend looking over your screenplay can help improve it in other ways.

Your script could be good. Great, even. But most times, drafts are missing things that only an outside observer can recognize isn’t there and suggest to be added. Many television shows have test audiences that tell the producers what isn’t working and they suggest adding things that the producers never thought of that could make the show infinitely better. Screenplay writing is no different. The person you give your screenplay to can suggest the addition of elements your screenplay is lacking. They can recommend connectors that join scenes together in better ways. They can lend an idea that makes a character(s) or their relationship more interesting. But this person cannot do that if you don’t give them your screenplay.

When I tell someone a new joke, they respond in one of two ways. They either laugh or they don’t. Even before they can suggest alternative punch lines or wildling down the joke to its bare bones, their reaction to the joke tells me more than any analysis ever could. So having a person other than you read your work can tell you scores of things solely from their reaction to the work. You’ll know it’s good if the person describes it with adjectives like “page-turner,” “breath-taking,” and “gripping.” If your screenplay gets an “it was alright,” you know you have a lot more work to do. But you’ll only know that after hearing it from someone else. 

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