December 4, 2016
Amir Shehata
I read many script writing books, which I would highly recommend doing. There are a lot of good ones out there, but one that stood out to me is “Story: Substance, structure, style and the Principles of Screenwriting”. I’m a big advocate of always going back to the experts and learning from them. With so much information out there now, there is no excuse not to do just that.
In “Story” the author says that the first draft of a script is generally unusable. I’m the kinda guy who always wants to move forward to new things. For someone to tell me you have to keep rewriting the same script to make it better, is torture. So I read the book, but couldn’t really accept the concept of rewrites. However, as I was writing Turning Point, I got first hand experience of the necessity of rewrites.
The interesting thing I found is that every time I rewrote the script, I introduced an element that completely changed the story. By 2012 I had scripted six episodes, each of which I must’ve rewrote 5 times or so. In fact by the time we started filming I had rewritten all these episodes ten times.
The other thing I advocate is getting as many eyes on your scripts as possible. Ideally, you’d get someone who has mastered the craft of script writing to dissect your script and give you feedback. I had good and bad experiences with script reviewers. You’ll always run into three types of people. People who don’t want to do it, but say yes out of obligation. This is the worst type of people to deal with. Better just avoid them completely. People who are willing but don’t have expertise in reviewing scripts. You can get some minimal amount of benefit from such people. And finally the people who are willing and have the expertise. This type is extremely rare. In fact you have to either pay a lot of money for their services or if they are doing it for free as a favor, then you probably have very limited time with them and you ought to be learning from them as much as possible in the short time you’ll have access to them. In fact, I only met one person in this category.