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Below is the third section of the general notes I received for my script of Dig Down. This section had concluded with a link to a video, which I have opted not to include in this blog post.

CHARACTERIZATION:
The main characters all have unique voices and styles, they have varied tones about them.
However, you should check your character intros and make sure everyone has these elements –
Character Intros – The Character Intro should try to give us an image of the character while
expressing their mood, emotion or general atmosphere. You also want to describe them in
action in someway – what are they doing. It sets tone and place. You can do this with any small
action. Also, as to the physical, pick the things that stand out about the character or are
important to the story.

I think there are some character mix ups throughout the script. At one time it says Rocco is dead
on the news and that threw me off. Also, the sicarrios need something that differentiates them
a bit, they need character. They need something that makes them interesting or quirky in the
way they work or makes the reader feel more scared for Rob. As it is now, they are a bit bland
and the most rational people in the script. But they definitely need something that makes them
more menacing think of Luca Brazzi in Godfather or the siccario in Breaking Bad. They make
them dark, scary characters who are killers. Check out the documentary on the Ice Man and
how cold this assassin was. These guys need to be scary. Now they just feel like two guys who
have a job to do but that job could also be drywall for the afternoon.
Characters need to pay off in this story in a meaningful way. I talked about this in structure and
will talk more about it in conflict. As it is now, most of the characters are not paying off in a
meaningful way to the story or in contrast to Rob.
So your characters all have strong external stakes. But they don’t really have internal stakes
drawing them into the emotion of the story or philosophical stakes. Let’s use an example. Let’s
say that the theme is love and Rob being unloved. What I would do is writer down every
character – even Axel and the Sicarrios. You may not use it in the script but you will know your
characters better with this method.
I write this every script –
ROB:
External Stakes –
Internal Stakes –
Philosophical Stakes –
Secret –
Now we know the external stakes are his life and future escaping with the woman he loves.
ROB:
External Stakes – his life and future escaping with the woman he loves.
Internal Stakes –
Philosophical Stakes –
Secret –
So what are his internal stakes – he has never been loved by his father. Maybe his wife loved him
at one time but not anymore or maybe she still does but he doesn’t see it. But he believes he is
loved by Axel’s daughter Vicky. So it would this –
ROB:
External Stakes – his life and future escaping with the woman he loves.
Internal Stakes – being loved by the woman he loves – Vicky.
Philosophical Stakes –
Secret –

His philosophical stakes are then that you have to fight and do anything you can to be loved. He
will get her the coke she wants. He will do anything to be successful in his father’s firm to be
loved by his father. You have to earn love by being willing to do anything is his philosophical
position.
ROB:
External Stakes – his life and future escaping with the woman he loves.
Internal Stakes – being loved by the woman he loves – Vicky.
Philosophical Stakes – You have to earn love by being willing to do anything
Secret –
Finally is his secret. His secret is the gold in the case in a physical sense. He kills the one whose
love he couldn’t get to get Vicky’s love with the gold. So the gold should be more important
than being left behind earlier.
That is one secret but it seems there is more. A more internal one we don’t see. How old was
she when he got Vicky? What did he do to get her to love him? This seems where the real secret
lies. We should discuss this. This is the China Town moment in this story that doesn’t play out.
So now you have Rob but you have to do all the others. You may not use everything but you as
the writer will now know everything. This will direct how you write the characters and what
they do.
Finally, check this out – possibly the greatest lecture on stakes I’ve ever seen and will go into
more depth on this than I can here

PACE & TONE:
The pace and tone are fine for the story overall.
You have a crime/chase genre pace but with a noir-ish tone. The tone could be boosted to make
it more noir-ish and unique as you are then combining adjacent sub-genres in a way we haven’t
seen. I would recommend doing this for a few reasons. You have these noir-ish moments with
the father and then you have noir-ish moments with the enemies meeting and feeling each
other out quite a few times. These could be enriched to more fun, exciting and tense. By doing
that, it ups the tension in the chase scenes as well because it creates what Hollywood
technically terms “Oh Fuck Moments”. It goes like this – Oh, fuck! What’s going to happen if the
sicarrios catch up to him this time? That is what you want the readers/viewers thinking. If you
play your tone right then that happens. As it is now it is in the beginning but once he does meet
them its gone. What you need it for that moment to escalate to the next Oh Fuck Moment.
Think of Pulp Fiction – if you haven’t seen it go watch it right now. But there are multiple
moments like this and I believe your script has the potential for those moments as well.
For example – rather than hearing about what happened to Bam Bam. What if he goes to seem
and finds the torture that happened to him and there is a message that his will be worse. This
lets the audience know what the Volcan is capable of. Think of Marius in Pulp Fiction – we know
he is a badass and what his people do cause we SEE it done to others. In your story we are TOLD
he is a badass but never see it. If we see it and the main character sees it then we worry for him
and we know it will be worse.
For the type of story you are writing, you have to escalate tone the way you escalate conflict.
This is important and we should discuss this at length because otherwise I’ll be here writing a
thesis on this.
The second aspect of pace and tone is in the writing. First, you can create stronger tone by word
choice. For genre stories like this you need to get better word choice in the description. You can
look up crime genre or noir genre words on Google and find that people put together whole
sheets of genre words. You should be using these types of things to really infuse the tone
throughout the script.
As to pace, the story needs to paced out better in individual scenes. As it is now the writing is
thick and overly descriptive for a script. When eh action starts the writing should be shorter,
more staccato, to make the action feel faster. Then you slow it down in moments of peace by
writing out longer sentences for description. Same goes for dialogue. Right now there are so
many speeches that they lose importance. When a speech comes it should hold weight but if
there is a long dialogue every scene they become meaningless no matter what is being told. The
dialogue ship be more clipped for this type of movie and lead up to speeches. When they come
then they bring gravitas but now there are so many that they just become someone telling
something off screen we don’t see. Which goes to the old adage SHOW don’t TELL

Below is approximately the first two pages of notes I received on my script of Dig Down

Hi Damian – Before we dive in I want you to know that anything that doesn’t make sense in the
notes we can discuss when we do the call, including the Page by Page notes.
GENERAL LOOK:
Overall, the script looks clean but thick. Giving it a quick scan the script looks like the formatting
is correct but you’ve seen some minor mistakes I put in the page by page notes, nothing major.
Another aspect of the look is there are lots of large blocks of text in description and dialogue. It
looks like there are a lot of speeches in here. Some of these need to be broken up to make the
read flow easier. I’ll get to that below and how to do it.
The second thing is that we need to work on your overall story and genre. This is something we
will discuss in this set of notes and on the call but there are really simple ways to elevate your
story and create what we call the Mind Movie. We will also need to discuss the Mind Movie and
use of description which we will get into below.
Overall, the first look and look of the pages is that the script is in pretty good shape. Changes int
he page by page are slight. For the larger issues of story and genre, I think there are simple
solutions to those I found in the read. So that is the good news and there are things to learn
here that will help you bring out the beauty of your story..
TITLE:
The title Dig Down, immediately it makes me think this guy is going to have to dig down deep
into his character to overcome something. However, that doesn’t pay off. I’m curious what it
means for you and we will discuss on the call but in the script I only found it once where it is
referenced. So it’s not one of those titles that pops up in the story and has major meaning or
emotional impact.
So I recommend two lines of action here – 1. We figure out what it means to you and why for
this story. Then we need to figure out how that plays out for the audience and if it resonates. 2.
Consider other titles. The genre here is crime but depending on how you decide to write this –
this could be an insanely great modern noir. It has all the elements but it doesn’t quite click into
place. Right now it is more of a chase movie that would fall under the crime genre. It had
elements of Falling Down and Pulp Fiction but I think the great opportunity here is the modern
noir element.
So for the title we need to consider those two items. However, if you are open to considering a
new title there are a few things to consider. One, it has to be something that makes readers
want to put your script at the top and generate interest. Think of genre pieces like Game of
Thrones. You immediately get it without ever reading anything else. Or the Maltese Falcon – you
get that this is going to be the key McGuffin in the movie. This is the item that drives ever
characters story. Devil in a Blue Dress – it really tells the genre and hints at titles from a certain
time period as does The Black Dahlia. So the title needs to tell genre and give an interesting
hook. OR you could have a title that comes out in the story and is either representative of
theme or a key turning point of the story and realization for the main character.
But overall – the title needs to hook the reader to put your story at the top of their pile.
STRUCTURE:
Structurally speaking the script hits the right points. You have all he major beats.
I am not worried about this macro aspect in your writing. However, there are structural issues of
theme which I discuss below and scenes which could escalate stronger. These are discussed in
character and theme and conflict sections.
The one thing I want to discuss as part of structure is the ending.
The end fell flat for me and I think that there is a great opportunity here that you are missing
out on. We should discuss this over the call though.
But I will say this – if we think of Ruth coming in and killing him – what was it all for? I’m not
saying he should escape. But why her? Why is she the one? Think on that and let’s discuss on
the call.
I normally don’t do this. I would normally explain my thoughts here but much of what I see in
the other sections lead up to this and I would prefer you read those sections and see how you
feel about it before we discuss the ending as all those things may influence your thoughts on it.
So read everything else first and then we will discuss the ending. These calls are usually quite
long so make sure you have the time blocked and we will get through everything

With the time for the meeting with one of the judges from the Page Turner screenplay competition set, and with no obstacle preventing me from attending that meeting, the only things left to do were to wait for and review the notes. And as I mentioned in a previous post, I was told to expect a very positive meeting, so I was early awaiting this feedback.

I received the notes on March 7, which gave me 3 full days to soak in the notes and prepare for the meeting on March 10. I planned to have a readthrough of it when I first received them, then take notes to organize my thoughts and talking points so I could be prepared for this conversation.

The notes came in two files, one the general notes on the script as a whole, and the other was the page by page notes. Luckily for me, the page by page notes were mostly just small grammar and formatting issues, easy to correct. The real meat was in the general notes, which turned out to be 7 pages.

I’m going to be sharing the full set of notes I received over the coming weeks, breaking it up into manageable sections for a blog post, starting next week.

Until next time.

Happy New Year!!

When I last left off, I shared that I had to make a decision when I double booked my time to sit in on an interview panel for work, and when I booked a meeting to discuss my script for Dig Down. While this tricky situation wasn’t foreign to me, the outcome was.

I mentioned in my last post that I believed this was a test from the universe: asking me if I really saw myself as a writer. I also said this was one of the easiest decisions I ever made.

Well, when I made it, I fully expected I would need to come up with some excuse to get myself out of the interview panel. Calling in sick was a possibility, I had plenty of time, didn’t do it that often, and another member of the panel had to miss an interview earlier that week. It was early March, so this was a likelihood for this time of the year.

Or, if I felt I couldn’t make myself sound sick, I could always say something went wrong at the house and I needed to address it. My home has a high water table, and I did have some water in my basement, so this wasn’t even a lie.

But then something happened. Something I’m not used to happening when I get myself into these predicaments.

Things just worked themselves out.

The interview I was supposed to conduct-what had been double booked with my meeting for the script consultation, and literally the ONLY thing I had on my work calendar that day-was cancelled. Now, this in all likelihood was because something came up with the candidate and they were no longer able to make the interview, or no longer interested. I honestly don’t remember, because I had a complete interpretation of what had happened.

The universe had tested me. I had passed. And so it rewarded me.

With my decision made, there was no scheduling obstacle to overcome anymore. So it disappeared. I know, I know. This was really because of the candidate.

I just like my version better.

Until next time.

Picking up where my last post left off, I had committed such a careless blunder with my schedule. I had double booked myself with an interview panel I was supposed to sit in on, as well as a phone consultation to go over my script of Dig Down.

I’ve always worked really hard to keep my work and writing life separate. My dream has always been to be a writer, and it was something that I finally realized in 2019 when I published my first book, Dig Down.

At the same time, while I still strive to turn that dream into a career, I have my own career that shoulders the weight of paying the bills until my writing and other pet projects can do so on their own. Its always been important to me to not do anything to jeopardize the career I currently have, because losing it might result in losing both. If I had to find a new job, that would take away from my time to write, and who knows how much a new profession would allow for my passion.

So this was tricky for me, and a difficult situation. I’m not kidding when I say it wasn’t until I wrote this blog post that it even crossed my mind the money I committed to get this phone consultation. At the time, I was thinking I either needed to find a way out of the interview panel, or to ask to reschedule the meeting. In both cases, I knew I’d be coming up with a lame lie that I hope didn’t irritate either my job or the contest judge too bad.

What honestly helped me put things into perspective was the last line of the email that I had shared in the previous post:

‘I’ve attached all the notes and Joe was excited by the script so should look forward to a great call on Friday at 2pm.’

To that point, I was leaning towards taking the call, but it was still a toss up. This one line reminded me of something.

I had submitted my script for Dig Down into the competition for the same reason that I submitted it to an editor when I was recovering from knee surgery. Because I believed in my writing, and I believed in myself as a writer. These are two beliefs I’ve held ever since I was a kid, growing up, writing stories that people wouldn’t see for years, because I was so firm in that belief. These were absolute truths to me.

When I read (and re-read that line) over and over, I saw this double booking for what it was. The universe has given me validation for my belief of being a writer time and again. I got it from the feedback of people I first shared my stories with. I got it from my editor, someone I’d never met or interacted with who could tell just from a few pages I wasn’t like most first time writers. And I get it all the time when people tell me what they enjoyed about my stories. The message from the contest wasn’t just another example of praise for my writing though. It was a test.

It was like the universe was saying “It’s time to put up or shut up. Yeah, you wrote some stories, but your only sacrifice has ever been your free time. What if something you valued was actually at stake? What if you did have to jeopardize the career that allowed for your cushy lifestyle, would you still follow your dreams?”

In short: Do you really see yourself as a writer?

It was the same situation I was faced with: career and dream were fighting for the same time. But with the perspective of this test, the decision was one of the simplest I’ve ever had to make.

I was never going to be on that interview panel.