1. Put Your Script On Ice For A Month
When you've finished your screenplay and you think it's about done, there's only one thing for you to do: put it away and stop thinking about it. For, like, a month - two months, even. Though it's probably your first instinct to send it out into the world and try to get somebody important to read it, hold back. You know when you read anything that a day after writing it you always find something you could've done better? Exactly what we have here. One of the inherent annoyances of being a writer of any kind is that you always feel like you could go back to any piece of work in retrospect and change it. Small things. The fact that you've got the chance to do this with your screenplay is a good thing. So when you revisit that script your wrote a month ago, you'll see it with fresh, unbiased (well,
less biased) eyes. You can be critical and harsh, and - best of all - you can change it. Though he's talking about novel writing here, Stephen King relayed how important this process is:
If youve never done it before, youll find reading your book over a six-week layoff to be a strange, often exhilarating experience. Its yours, youll recognize it as yours, even be able to remember what tune was on the stereo when you wrote certain lines, and yet it will also be like reading the work of someone else, a soul-twin, perhaps. This is the way it should be, the reason you waited ."
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