Fix Your Scene With My Screenwriting Checklist
You know that feeling when you’re writing a script, and you just can’t figure out why some of your scenes suck?
Sometimes you know a scene doesn’t work, but you can’t quite figure out WHY it doesn’t work. So here are seven common pitfalls in screenwriting that can ruin any scene and any script.
Use this as a checklist to diagnose your own script’s ailments (it has saved my films more times than I can count).
1. Does your scene start too soon or end too late?
A very common mistake with novice filmmakers and writers is that they want to show you everything. The audience is smarter than that, and they don’t have that kind of patience. So, you need to show them the bare minimum to get your point across. This makes your scene more engaging for the viewer and keeps the momentum of the film going.
In a short film I made called The Flash Drive, there’s an interrogation/torture scene where this character named Alex is tied up, and he’s trying to convince a dirty cop not to kill him.
At the end, the cop decides not to kill him. So shouldn’t the end of the scene be the cop making the decision?
In this case, if we had shown the cop make the decision, it would have completely dropped the tension, and hurt the pacing of the film. Why bother? Should be also show him untie Alex, let him go, and give him a butt slap on the way out the door? All that is completely unnecessary. Instead, we showed the cop on the cusp of making the decision. He may kill Alex; he may not.
And then, we cut away.
We cut to a shot of a doorknob, and hold on it. And then finally, the Alex character opens the door, and we realize the cop made the decision to let him go.
So, by ending the scene earlier, it kept the tension high, kept the viewer on the edge of their seat, and it immediately propelled us into the next scene and the next conflict.
2. Does your scene lack conflict?
Good scenes are based on conflict. It is the most essential building block of drama.
Yet sometimes, writers find themselves needing to deliver information to their audience (also called exposition), and these scenes fall flat because they forget that they still need conflict.
Exposition dumps like this actually require MORE creativity and conflict to work. A character should never give up information easily. That’s lazy writing. Other characters should have to work for it, and conflict is often the best way to do that.
So imagine a scene where a guy tells his crush he doesn’t want to go to the pool with her. She asks why, and he tells her that he can’t swim. That felt way too easy right?
How about instead he makes up weak excuses why he can’t go, she gets upset that he’s avoiding spending time with her, he gets defensive, and it blows up into a yelling match until out of frustration he drops the bomb that he can’t swim.
Now the exposition feels earned. All thanks to a little conflict.
3. Does your scene provide more information than the audience needs?
Audiences can infer more than you think, so don’t over-explain anything. Your audiences will find it slow and insulting.
In my short film Will “The Machine” a high school football coach had a job offer to coach in college, and his star player was putting that opportunity in jeopardy by acting out.
But the film wasn’t about the coach, it was about the troubled player. In the end, we cut out the coach’s backstory because it was unnecessary to the story. It was enough to just get the sense that the coach was too self-centered to solve Will’s problems.
This sped up the scene and allowed the audience to fill in the gaps themselves, making it more engaging.
