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Although I wouldn’t say I was dallying, after one full week devoted to edits and rewrites of my script for Dig Down, I was really starting to feel the looming deadline, just 10 days away. While I had been making incremental progress, I felt I was nowhere near capturing anything close to all the areas that were covered during my two and a half hour phone consultation just the week before.

I knew that I needed to make the most of this upcoming weekend.

While it was daunting, it wasn’t all bad. I didn’t feel close to finishing, but that was because I had invested a lot of time during the week towards identifying the areas of the screenplay that needed improvement, as well as brainstorming and drafting several ideas to implement those improvements. I had come up with new character introductions that I believed captured them very well for a first impression. I also had drafted a few new scenes to showcase characters that might have only been referenced in the script (and the book) to help better convey who was beyond some of the obstacles that Rob would face during the story.

One character of note was Ruth, who in addition to being only briefly featured in the book, something that I believe worked to the strength in that medium, barely had any screentime, something that was a criticism in all three forms of feedback I’d gotten. I had come up with a brief storyline to weave in through the early going of the screenplay to give some context to who she was.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t all good either. The temperatures picked up, so all the snow we’d gotten in the middle of the week began to melt, and most of it found its way into my basement. While I had a five gallon bucket there to capture the water as it came in, it would fill up every fifteen minutes. This meant if I wanted to keep pace with the water coming into my house, I would have to break away from my work every quarter hour to empty it out.

It wasn’t ideal, but this was what I ended up doing throughout the weekend. I’m an early riser, so I would wake up, empty the bucket, replace it with a smaller bucket, and wet vac my floor until it was just damp (essentially emptying out the wet vac at least 15 times). I’d replace the 5 gallon bucket to collect the water, shower, go to the basement to empty it out again, have breakfast, empty out the bucket one last time, and then get to work.

I’d start my revisions/edits around 8 in the morning, and aside from taking a break for lunch, I rigidly kept to a schedule of going through the script and implementing changes, heading downstairs to the basement every fifteen minutes to empty the nearly overflowing bucket again, and keep to this routine until 8 at night. Yes, you read that right. Aside from a lunch break, I would work nearly 12 hours straight throughout the weekend.

My mind would be swimming by the time I logged off. My body sore from stooping over to lug a bucket to my sump pump four times an hour. A social life was non-existent, and I knew Monday morning it wasn’t going to feel like I had any time off. I felt like I worked harder than I did at my job.

And while it may have been grueling, I can’t say I hated it. I wasn’t thrilled about the basement, but to me, this was something I’d worked my whole life to achieve. Putting myself in a position to be working on my story, a story that people were praising and wanted to see it elevated to what it could be. Yes, it was tough, but it was what I loved, and to me, how could I not work hard, put in the work that was necessary for something that I loved.

I was thoroughly worn out by the time Sunday night rolled around. Yet as my head hit the pillow, willing myself to get mentally prepared to start a new week of the work the next morning, two things brought a smile to my face. One, as tough as it was, I had loved the experience of locking myself in my house just to work on one of my stories.

And two, for the first time since the phone consultation, my script was really starting to take shape.

After a focused weekend in I performed a deep analysis of my script of Dig Down and then started reading and analyzing other scripts, I unfortunately had to return to my regular schedule. That included work for a good portion of the day.

Despite not being able to devote this chunk of time to revisions, in which I was already under the gun and down to just two weeks left to re-submit, I was still filling up all of my free time with working on the script. It was the first thing I would work on when I woke up, as I tried to put in as close to an hour of rewrites before work, and when I got home, this was the focus.

The only problem was work wasn’t the only obstacle that week.

My writer’s group met on Monday night, and although there was a storm coming that prevented me from attending in person, I managed to connect online and got a couple of pages down in the hour we set aside from writing. That storm was the big one for the year, so I worked from home the next day, so I didn’t have to worry about spending time on my commute, short as it was.

While the storm first helped out with the rewrite process, it soon became a huge hinderance. My house has a high water table, and as the snow began to melt, it just kept coming into my basement. I set up a bucket where the biggest leak into the house was coming from, and even though it could hold more than five gallons, I was down in the basement emptying it out every twenty minutes when I was home. And this doesn’t include the time I had to spend with the wet vac to remove all the water that had spilled over while I was at work.

Mornings were getting tougher to face as the week went on. What started out as me having concerns for how far along I was coming along turned into questioning whether I had the energy to get out of bed to keep up with the water in the basement and still put in some time to work on the script. Looking back, its not surprising that I had doubts about the new scenes I was looking to add to flesh out characters a bit more as well as the ending I was revamping for the script when I was exhausted from having to empty out a bucket of water 3-4 times an hour when I was home.

A full week was down since my phone consultation to review the Dig Down script, and while I wouldn’t say my progress was limited, I definitely felt like I was behind. Thankfully this was still mid-March, which made my next decision easier, which was to commit the weekend to working on rewrites.

I’ll get into how that went, next time.

I took a different approach to my script of Dig Down the following day. One of the things that was discussed in the phone consultation was applying the right tone to give the screenplay the feel of a film noir. Tone was also one of the things I was scored on in the Santa Barbara Screenplay Competition, and so I felt this would be a good thing to focus on next: not just individual things throughout the script, but something that would impact the entire story.

In the phone consultation, the judge had said that word choice was a great way to set the kind of feel I wanted for my story. He had even given some examples of writers and some excerpts of their writing style to give my some guidance. Additionally, he had given the suggestion beyond excerpts to read through scripts of the genre I was looking to write in so that I could get a feel for creating tone in more than just a few passages.

So I downloaded a couple of screenplays, Chinatown and Bladerunner 2049, and sat down to read the latter as it was the more recent (the judge had said that the general writing style of screenplays changed every couple of years – five, I think – and so I felt it was better to read through a script that had been written in the past few years).

Although not to the extent of yesterday, I went through the script, taking notes of word choices and descriptions used throughout to create a tone and feel of the story. I felt I started to get a sense of how this could improve my own screenplay, and was even starting to get ideas for description I could use in Dig Down.

While it was a big of a light day, and although I hadn’t made any revisions to my script in the two days since my phone consultation, I felt I had never attained this level of analysis on my story, and that included all the re-writes I had made just to publish it, as well as the serials and short stories I had written about characters in this world. Though any changes I had made were superficial, I felt taking the two days to get a deeper understanding of the story and my script would help me immensely going forward.

After an exciting Friday of script analysis and feedback, it was time to get to work. While the three screenplays I had entered all had various final deadlines for resubmissions, the contest with the most promise, Page Turner, also had the earliest.

For the next 17 days, I was under the gun.

The first thing I felt I needed was to be able to have the entire script in front of me at once. While I could skip to wherever I wanted to in the screenplay with the software I was using, I could still only view one, maybe two, pages at a time. I felt it would be important to be able to look at multiple pages throughout the script where a character showed up to see if they were always adding new information or advancing the story. I wanted to make sure details or actions I gave didn’t become repetitive. I wanted something that I could mark up with notes.

And…I suppose I wanted to feel like I was working with an actual script, something tangible that I could have in hand, flip through.

I have the worst luck with printers, probably because I always splurge on the cheap models at Walmart. And this time was no exception. Hey, I didn’t need top of the line quality, I just needed something that could get the job done today.

After a brief excursion to buy a new one, I got to work right away. I made notes on everything in the script that had come up in the phone consultation the day before: recording the number of flashbacks, recording the number of speeches, recording the number of long action paragraphs, recording the number on oners (lines in a paragraph that only had a word or two). All of the problematic things that were brought up in the consultation, and the other two notes of feedback from the other contests, those were singled out with a red pen.

I also made notes of every character’s intro, and ideas I had to improve them if I felt they were weak. I made notations for where I felt I could incorporate some of the other feedback I had gotten.

I had a hard time sitting still, partly because I always do, but also because I was excited. It might sound crazy, going through your work and highlighting all the problems with it, but I thought it was great. Everything I found felt like it was bringing me one step closer to improving the script, and bringing it into the best shape it could be.

It probably took me over three hours to go through the entire script this way. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was four. And I definitely felt like I had put in all I could after reviewing, analyzing and pinpointing all the examples of weak points that the judge’s had spotted in my script. But I also felt really accomplished.

Even though it wasn’t the two and a half hour positive phone consultation from the day before, I felt this was the second day in a row I’d made great strides in my writing career. Even as I shut down for the day to relax and get ready for tomorrow, my mind kept churning out more and more ideas of how to take the notes I was given and improve my script.

For the second night in a row, when my head hit the pillow, I couldn’t wait to get back to work tomorrow.

This felt almost incredible. In late January of last year, I had entered my script for Dig Down into three screenplay competitions, and in just over a month, and in about the span of one week, I had gotten my notes on all of them.

I was still coming off of the high of how great my first ever consultation had gone for my script, and yes, I still felt elated, even after the notes I had gotten from the Santa Barbara Screenplay Competition. Writing this story was still a journey, even though I had already published it four years ago, because I had taken up adapting it into a new medium, and I felt it was important to recognize the high points along that journey.

But not to dwell on them.

Tomorrow I would need to get back to work. And from the notes I had gotten from the three competitions, I had my work cut out for me. Yes, the notes had been positive. Even the Santa Barbara feedback had still scored my script a 79. I did feel it could be higher, but I also recognized there was room for improvement, and there definitely were critiques that I agreed with.

The thing to do now was to take stock of all that feedback. My purpose for entering multiple contests was to get a collective, objective opinion on it – both good and bad – to narrow down what worked and what didn’t. If I entered just one, I risked making revisions based on the whims and preferences of one judge. But with multiple sets and sources of notes, I could hone in on the similarities, prioritize those, and then take on the remarks and comments that only appeared in one set of feedback based on how I felt they would impact the story.

I also had to be cognizant of the deadlines that the three competitions had. While they were running concurrently, they each had their own final submission dates. Both Page Turner and Santa Barbara had only a few weeks remaining – for Page Turner I only had 17 days left to submit a revised draft – but I still had a month with Finish Line.

I decided to prioritize Page Turner, both because I had gone the extra step and had a phone consultation to cover my script, and because there was a lot of overlap between the feedback from them and Finish Line, and I felt addressing Page Turner would also cover a large part of the revisions for Finish Line.

It was Santa Barbara that I chose to forego. There deadline was a little after Page Turner, and while some of their feedback was similar, I felt it raised points and areas of improvement that didn’t mesh with the other two contests, and given the timeframe I had to work within, I didn’t think I could make revisions that took the script in two different directions – it wasn’t exactly like creating two completely different versions, but it would be tailoring two different drafts of the same story to submit to two different contests – wasn’t the best use of my time.

I was essentially opting to sacrifice the results of one contest to improve my chances with the other two.

With a gameplan in place to work on my revisions, the next thing to do would be to prioritize the feedback to address. And as my head hit the pillow for the night, I resolved that the following morning, I would start to analyze my script.

There was one category that I had excluded from sharing the notes on in my previous post: Dialogue. I stated that I withheld it for a week because I wanted to address the comment made by the judge in it, and the post was already long. I believe in being transparent about my writing career, but I also felt that because this was the once section of the judge’s notes that I planned on responding to, that it would be better to separate it out into its own post that focused on: 1) the feedback itself, and 2) my response to it.

Here is the comment I received for the Dialogue category of Dig Down:

This is the element of the script that needs the most work. Rob’s voiceover feels unnecessary. Much of his can be cut. Or, if he’s going to have novel-like interior monologues, they should have a poetic quality (as in Taxi Driver and Clockwork Orange). As it is, it feels like he’s going over his to-do list for the sake of the audience. Expository dialogue also occurs in the exchanges between Rob and Preston. They spend a lot of time unpacking past history. The scenes should focus on the present-tense conflict between the two men, while the story of Rob’s destruction of the company could be shown rather than told. Finally, anything that might be perceived as racist needs to be looked at closely. Colorful slang and grammatical errors are fine, but “Black” dialect spelled out phonetically is no longer acceptable. Lines like “WHAY HE GO? WHAY
THAT MO-FUCKA GO?” need to be revised or cut.

My response is solely in regard to the final note that the judge made, which I feel takes the example line they gave in the final sentence as an example of “Black” dialect. I do agree with that this kind of dialect is not longer acceptable, and will even take it a step further and say it was never acceptable. But I take huge exception to the implication that this type of dialect was being used here.

For starters, unless I specified it in the story, either in the book or screenplay, I don’t assign a race or skin color to any of my characters in any story I write. Rocco is Italian, Axel and Vicky are of Swedish heritage, and the sicarios are from Mexico. I specified these backgrounds to create a sense that the crimes taking place in Dig Down had a global impact and involved many parties: the government, international companies, drug cartels, and the mob. Specifying this aspect of some characters made sense to me because I believed it served the story to show why there was such a widespread manhunt for the main character Rob.

The character with this line is referred to as The Shark in both the book and the script. The only character description I gave for him in the script was: a loan shark toughened by a life on the street, flashes Rob a sickeningly toothy grin. This description occurs on page 3 of the script. This description was nearly identical to the one I gave for the character in the book on page 6, which reads: “Then he looked up at the loan shark he’d borrowed money from, flashing him that sickeningly tooth grin of his.” I tweaked the description slightly for the screenplay because the medium requires actions to be written in present tense, and the sentences need to be snappier in a script so the readers can digest the story quicker.

In neither version is there any reference to the character’s race, only their life history in the screenplay, that they had a hard life on the street. I felt the image of being hardened by life would help evoke how this character became a loan shark. Again, I felt it would help serve the story. In the context of the story, Rob’s face is plastered all over the news, his friends have abandoned him, and his assets are frozen. Needing to escape, I didn’t believe he would turn to a bank to get money. I don’t even give the character’s real name in either version. The story is told from Rob’s point of view, and its implied in both versions Rob never bothered to learn it because he never planned on paying the loan shark back. I bring this up to illustrate that The Shark could be anybody who had a rough upbringing that led them to a life of crime. This isn’t exclusive to any race, nationality or anyone’s skin color, which is why I feel it was inappropriate for the judge to assume The Shark was using a “Black” dialect for that line, and I’ll return to that point in a moment.

Furthermore, as I said, unless specified, I don’t assign a race to any of my characters. So when I read this portion of the feedback, it made me wonder about how the judge perceived two of the main characters – Rob and Preston. The description I gave for Rob was: a mid-thirties, panicky businessman. The description I gave Preston was: a sickly old man still grasping onto the strength of his youth. The conversation they have through most of the story boils down to a father wanting his son to apply himself more. This is a concept that I feel is universal, and I don’t see how this or either of the character descriptions could be applied exclusively to one group. I would hope that when anyone reads the book, or auditions for the role of these characters, that they could envision themselves as any of these characters.

Lastly, I took exception to the line of dialogue the judge used to make his point. This is not the first line of dialogue the character has. The first line The Shark has, in both the book and screenplay, is “Knew you’d be coming here eventually.”

I hope you feel this is a sharp contrast to the line the judge referenced to make their point. The Shark has 12 blocks of dialogue prior to the line the judge commented on, and they’re written similarly to the line I referenced. In those 12 dialogue blocks, The Shark conveys a sense of savviness. Just with the line “Knew you’d be coming here eventually,” he’s the only one involved in the manhunt of Rob who actually figured out where he would be, and got the drop on him. In the remaining eleven dialogue blocks, he conveys that he figured out Rob was planning on skipping town with the money he borrowed and had no plans on paying him back, and that he was proactive in making plans of his own, hopefully delivering exposition of Rob’s predicament in a way that felt natural. He uses words like ‘ain’t’ and ‘didja’, but I don’t think it approaches anything close to the type of dialogue that the judge mentioned.

The example the judge referenced is one of four, much shorter dialogue blocks, and they’re the last four things that The Shark says before he exits the story. I’m hoping that you might be asking yourself what made the dialogue used by The Shark go from the example I used to the example the judge used.

Here is the passage in the script that’s between the 12 dialogue blocks that are written like the example I gave, and the 4 dialogue blocks that are written the way the judge referenced:

Rob LUNGES ahead a step. Turns. Swings the suitcase at The Shark.

The Shark turns around just in time for the case to connect square with his face. Crumples into a heap in the street.

And shortly after, Rob says this:

How is he even awake right now? Sounds like I broke his jaw.

The line that the judge referenced wasn’t a decision to apply a dialect of any particular race – in the middle of a scene, no less – but to drive home the point that the character’s jaw had been broken. The reason for the change in the way The Shark was speaking was that I felt with a broken jaw, they would have trouble enunciating, and to go along with that, wherever I could, I dropped consonants like R, S and T. I did use a TH sound, but that was so the audience might be able to somewhat decipher or grasp what The Shark was trying to say. Having The Shark struggle with enunciating was important to the scene – again, I make decisions that I feel serve the story – because cops had arrived on the scene, and if The Shark was able to clearly state “Rob Moore is here” the man whose been all over the news and that there is a manhunt for, the cops would start looking for Rob, whereas if he was incoherent, this would give Rob a chance to escape.

One of the other four dialogue blocks where The Shark is talking like this is: OB! OB MOE! OB MOE IS HEE! (Notice I dropped the R’s in every word, but you still might be able to decipher it as “Rob! Rob Moore! Rob Moore is here!”). This led to the cops, later in the same scene, asking what they thought The Shark was saying, and even though they drew the conclusion I just shared, they also give an explanation why they didn’t believe him.

This is all to say that I took exception to the judge’s conclusion and comments about the dialogue for this particular instance. The character was talking one way and then changed their diction more than halfway through the same scene, and rather that express why this didn’t work for them, or question or even acknowledge what might have spurred this change midway through the scene, they cherry picked one of the dialogue blocks, seemingly assigned a race to a character and described it as problematic. The last thing I’ll say is that the judge’s own feedback says “…anything that might be perceived as racist needs to be looked at closely.” I agree with this, but I question to the point of doubting that the judge actually looked at the switch in the way this character talked to determine why, as the examples I cited in this posts all happen within a half page, both leading up to and in the immediate aftermath of the change to the way this character spoke.

Sorry if you found this post exceptionally long. It is one of, if not the longest, I’ve written, but I hope you understand why I felt the need to address this, and why I initially withheld it from the previous post because I wanted to respond to the feedback.

Despite this post, I did find the judge’s overall feedback and notes fair, and my disagreeing with some notes I receive wasn’t unheard of prior to these comments. I think its natural to have some disagreements over feedback, maybe even some pushback, but its important to never lose sight that this is always meant to help improve your work.

Until next time.