Refining My Script

by Gabriel Long

There were a lot of things I liked about my script going into this process, but I felt it could be better.  The story didn’t feel as compelling or engaging as I wanted it to.  It was tight, but a bit predictable.

In terms of re-writing, I felt I was at a bit of a dead end. I felt that every element of my script was so connected to the whole piece that unless I overhauled it, it would be difficult to improve.

During my second meeting with my mentor, Laurie Collyer, we talked about my script and how I might go about improving it, and Laurie suggested that I do a complete re-write as an exercise.  She thought it might free me up to continue improving on what I had.

The idea of writing an “exercise” script allowed me to get past my attachment to the interconnectedness of the previous draft. The resulting draft wound up involving the same location, characters, and subject matter, but was very different and significantly better. I allowed myself to completely re-imagine scenes with the knowledge that if they didn’t work I didn’t need to use them in the final version.

Rather than taking the best elements of the exercise script and melding them into the older draft, I did the reverse. I ended up taking the moments in the older draft that I thought held the essence of the story and constructed a new narrative around them. The end result was a more natural and compelling story.

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