The writer's scanning machine...

Once you think you've made all the necessary revisions and your script seems to be really working from start to finish, I suggest you take this rewriting phase one step further before releasing it to the world for the first time.

Put your opus away for a few days.  Then, when you set eyes on it again, try to reprogram your mind to become an ultra-sensitive scanning machine that you're going to feed each page into.  Turn yourself into a hypercritical, word-sensitive, fine-tuning device that can pick up even the slightest static of doubt or nag of uncertainty.  With this machine, nothing gets through that isn't absolutely right.  When anything stops you, a word choice, the smallest whisper questioning something, have the beeper in your mind go off and stop and fix it.  Don't move on until you can scan back over the same material and sail right through.

The point here is to make your script as good as you can before you solicit responses from others for the first time.  That's the only way you're going to make genuine progress with it from here on out.  If you're not happy with what you're asking others to respond to, why waste their time?

Another way of putting this is that in the art of scriptwriting there's no room for sloppiness or laziness.  Anything less than your absolute best effort just doesn't cut it.  And in the end you never get away with it.  True professionalism means more than extraordinary talent.  It means patience and hard work and being honest with yourself as to how good your writing really is.

John Patrick Shanley (winner of an Oscar, Pulitzer, and Tony with his work) once related to me a struggle he was having with a script:  I kept writing, over and over, ten pages for six weeks, seven days a week.  I kept writing the same ten pages over and over again, and I just kept saying, "This isn't true enough, this isn't true enough."  And I kept on trying to write it more truly.  It was one of the most grueling things I've ever done.  A horribly painful thing to do.  

Every writer who has consistent success in the profession takes this as a matter of course.  Becoming your own scanning machine (or whatever you want to call it), therefore, is simply one of the essential requirements.

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I'm the Program Director of the low-residency MFA in Writing for Stage and Screen being offered by the New Hampshire Institute of Art.  Our last residency ran from January 6-15, and (if you hurry) we can still consider applications for starting the program with our June 2017 residency running from June 22-July 1.  If you're interested, email me at buzzmclaughlin@gmail.com.

I'm also a playwright and screenwriter, producing partner in my production company Either/Or Films (The Sensation of Sight and Only Daughter) a professional script consultant, and the author of The Playwright's Process.  You can follow me on Twitter @eitherorfilms or @mfastagescreen.  I’m also on Facebook at buzzmclaughlinscriptconsulting.

How to handle the "bad day"

I know I've posted about this before, but how to deal with a bad writing day is something worth revisiting.  All of us experience these painful first draft sessions when everything comes to a grinding halt and the whole project you've been slaving over suddenly appears ridiculous.  And the negative voice grows to a fever pitch in volume asking "who are you trying to kid?"

Writers who have developed long successful careers have figured out how to handle this, depressing as it may be when it happens.  They've learned that they don't have a choice but to embrace these roadblocks as just part of the process and they've trained themselves to push through the inevitable moments of uncertainty, doubt, and a sense of being totally lost.

For example, Tony Award-winning playwright John Guare once told me when this happens, his solution is to "let it sit...It's not writer's block.  It's just that inside, down deep, you're trying to figure it out.  And it's just saying 'Leave me alone for a bit.  Just go away and do something else, because I'm trying to figure this out.  Come back in a couple of days.'  And I trust that process."

Or as multiple Tony Award -winner Terrence McNally tells us:  You should write with confidence and courage and boldness and be grown up enough when you have a bad day to just go out and get some ice cream and say, in the immortal words of Scarlett O'Hara, 'I'll think about it tomorrow.'"

Academy Award-winning screenwriter and playwright John Patrick Shanley puts it this way:  "You look at it and say, 'I don't know what to do,' and then you tell yourself, 'Well, you haven't known what to do before, and someday you will know what to do.  Put it away and go on with whatever else you're doing.'"

First drafts are tough largely because they don't have that sense of polish and professionalism of successful scripts you're familiar with.  And you have to just accept that your initial pages you're turning out may very well not measure up.  Just keep in mind that every one of these successful scripts was brought into existence in the same way yours is.  And the finished work might be the fifth, tenth, or twentieth  reworking of the very first pass through the story.

And especially with that first draft, bad days come with the territory.

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I'm the Program Director of the low-residency MFA in Writing for Stage and Screen being offered by the New Hampshire Institute of Art.  Our last residency just ended, running from January 6-15, and we are currently accepting applications for starting the program with our June 2017 residency running from June 23-July 2.  I'm also a playwright and screenwriter, producing partner in my production company Either/Or Films (The Sensation of Sight and Only Daughter) a professional script consultant, and the author of The Playwright's Process.

You can follow me on Twitter @eitherorfilms or @mfastagescreen.  I’m also on Facebook at buzzmclaughlinscriptconsulting.