Common script notes I give and how to fix them

As a manager, a producer, and script consultant, I read a lot of feature screenplays and TV pilots. These are the notes that come up most often.

Welcome to my Weekly Email Newsletter! Every week, I do a deep dive into an aspect of the craft and business of screenwriting from a literary manager’s perspective.

Today’s post is for subscribers only. If you’re new here, I recommend checking out the free posts at this link to sample what this newsletter has to offer.

Otherwise, keep reading for my insights on the biggest mistakes writers make in their scripts.

---

Since January of this year, I have done 61 consultations with screenwriters.

Each consultation involves reading the writer’s full feature or pilot script and putting it through this framework. Then I sit down with the writer via Zoom and give them my biggest, most overarching notes first. As we move through the conversation, I can start talking about smaller and narrower fixes.

After the meeting, I send them a recording of our conversation and write up a summary of the Top 3 Recommended Changes for their script.

These are the biggest recommendations because they:

1. Will have the biggest impact on improving the reader’s experience.

2. Will affect the script the most with changes that happen as a result of them.

There’s no point in offering notes on individual lines or typos if a glaring plot point is missing. There’s no point in giving notes on a scene that might get written out of the script altogether.

So, although many writers would prefer to go into their screenplays and do rewrites consisting solely of small, sentence-level tweaks, the reality is that most scripts need to be torn apart and started from the beginning.

And that’s okay!

If you throw out most of your first draft, that draft was not a waste of time.

It was a crucial step in helping you get to this even better second draft. But feeling married to what you have put down on the page can be detrimental. Even if a scene or moment is working, it’s not worth keeping if it isn’t adding to the overall goal you have for your story.

Letting go of your first draft and making big, sweeping changes in your rewrite takes a leap of faith.

It requires believing in yourself as a writer. Believing in your ability to write this script not just again, but again even better.

With the right notes and the right amount of courage, your second draft will retain the essence of what got you excited about this story in the first place.

But the structure of your script might be completely different.

Before you even get to the stage of the writing process where you get notes from a trusted friend, manager, or script consultant, you can do this process yourself.

First, I recommend taking a break from your script for as long as you can. A few weeks or even a month are ideal.

Then go through and re-read it.

In today’s article, I list the 7 most common Top 3 Recommended Changes I have for a writer when I do a consultation with them.

This way you can see if they apply to you before you send your story out into the world for feedback.