I remember when I saw the email from the 13Horror screenplay competition with notes on my script for Lock the Doors. I was scrolling through my emails on the weekend when I saw the message waiting for me, and my first thought was ‘I don’t like where I am, this isn’t the place to sit and read an email about the career I want to get into.’
The NEXT thought I had, once I had moved to another room, was ‘These are going to be good notes.’
I’m still not sure where that level of confidence came from. I know that I also had some doubts about how the script was going to be received. It was one of the first scripts I’d ever written (the third overall) and the only other script I had written that anyone else had ever seen had not been selected in the one competition I had entered it into fourteen years prior.
Maybe it was because this had already been worked on, and polished when I was working with my editor on the novella. I knew it had really good pacing (even after all the times I’d read and re-read it while working on it, its the one that surprised me how well it moved the first time I’d read it after I had published it), and maybe that was another reason for my optimism.
Whatever the case, it looked like I was right. I felt the notes were predominantly positive. But there were some areas where the judges felt it could be improved. And only a week to address them and re-submit.
I’ve had deadlines before when working with my editor, and getting the book ready to be published on Amazon. Yet for some reason, this deadline felt different. Maybe it was because, although I was paying them for the entry and the feedback, I wasn’t hiring them the same way I hired my editor, where we were working together to get the best version of the story out there.
And honestly, that terrified me a little.
But the notes were focused on specific things to improve the script. It was what I’d been hoping to achieve by entering the contest in the first place.
My first read through of the script post-feedback was marking down all the times I had directed the action with eye movements. I got such a kick out of it when the judge said my style of writing was more suited for a novel, and I thought it was a credit to how insightful they were. It’s actually been a note I’ve been cognizant of ever since, something I focused on when re-writing Dig Down.
Running through the script a second time, I then focused on replacing all those eye movements with just describing what I wanted the characters to do. I found the story lost nothing, since the screenplay is supposed to describe what will be on the screen, and so there was no point to show a character looking in a direction and then to see what they saw. Just cut out the middle man.
The third run I did through the script looked for those blocks of text and just hacking them down. There were several action blocks that were three and four lines (big no-no), and I worked to shave a line off each of them, at least.
One last run through the script to clean up any spelling and grammar issues I found. It all seems quick as I described it in less than four paragraphs, but by this point, my week was almost up. This was because I had taken a day assessing the notes and feedback and formulating a plan of how I was going to tackle the revisions, and each read through I had done constituted a day so I could reflect on the changes I’d made and how I felt about them.
I ended up re-submitting my script on July 22, a day before the deadline. Now all that was left was to wait for the results, and while the waiting was its own brand of nerve-racking, just like when I first got the email that the feedback was available, I felt good about where I was at with the script, and this time, I actually knew why. I felt I had done everything I could to address the areas identified that needed improvement, and left nothing on the field.
Until next time.