4 Screenwriting Tips that Annoy Me

How to Read Script Feedback with a Skeptic's Eye

Great screenwriting advice is not hard to find. There is mountains of it in books, on the internet and at lectures and seminars. And once you've sent a script out for criticism or coverage, you're likely to receive a lot of that advice spit back at you.

This is both good and bad.

On one hand, when you see the ideas of Syd Field, Robert McKee or Lew Hunter put to use in feedback of your script, there's a good bet that the reader has a solid foundation from which to dispense her criticism. On the other hand, some readers have a propensity to give notes with the tomes of screenplay theory used as a mental crutch. When this happens, what often emerges is some screenwriting tenant held too rigidly, causing a critic to gloss over why you may have intentionally broken some steadfast "rule".

Now, it is always advisable to at least consider every note that comes your way. Especially when more than one reader has raised the same issue. If that happens you can bet that you have a legitimate problem to address. But I've found some screenwriting rules to be unusually frequent as throw-away critiques. Rules that set off a reader's "spidey sense" as more of a robotic response than an intuitive story problem.

Here I will describe some of these rules and tell you how they can be misused.

Kill your babies.

When the momentum of a screenplay bogs down, a critic will often suggest to "kill your babies". This is a stirring way of saying you need to find the scenes that are most dear to you -- wether an action sequence or a snippet of dialogue -- and analyze their impact in moving the story forward. If they do not, then they are likely cases of writer indulgence and they should be deleted from the script.

Bogged-down momentum is a serious problem for a screenplay and if one of your "babies" is causing issues, then the scene must be altered to make it work. But throwing it out completely is a bizarre move because, if you've written something you "love dearly", you have written it for a reason. And it's probably the same reason you were compelled to write the script in the first place.