Inside the Room by Linda Venis

Author:Linda Venis [Venis, Linda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780698138377
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2013-08-06T04:00:00+00:00

After You’ve Written Your First Draft…

Write the Second

Congratulations again! You finished your first draft and typed “The End” (which may be the only words you don’t change when you rewrite). Getting to the end is very important. Johnny, tell us what prize you get for finishing your first draft… The chance to improve it greatly by writing a second draft!

Problems Can Be Opportunities

As you go back over what you’ve written, look for problems and opportunities. Problems must be fixed, and comic opportunities should be exploited. Many times, a problem is an opportunity, not only to fix that particular problem, but also to make you think and ruminate, finding better ways to tell your story, ways that will elevate your script to a higher level.

Keep Following the Footprint of the Show

What’s your page count? After you get your second draft finished, you’re going to want that number to be consistent with the average for an episode of your series. Each series is different, but generally, a single-camera show will be around thirty to thirty-two pages and a multiple-camera show will be around forty to forty-five pages. The series you are writing may vary from those numbers, but just be sure you are in tune with the page count of your series. Under no circumstances should your single-camera show exceed thirty-five pages or your multiple-camera show exceed forty-nine pages.

The very first thing every Savvy Reader does when looking at anyone’s script is to turn to the last page and check the page count. If you’re a little long now, that’s good. We’re sure there’s some stuff you can cut or compress. If your page count is short after your first draft, then your story probably needs a further complication and you’ll have to think hard about adding another difficulty or two along the way that your characters will have to deal with.

Sprint off the Starting Line

Does your story get off to a fast start? You don’t have to establish the “normal world” like you do if you’re writing a screenplay. The audience knows the “normal world”—they’ve seen the show, so don’t tread water in the normal world of the series for very long at all. You need to get your inciting incident in early and kick off your story.

Do you have at least one really good joke on the first page? We told you earlier not to worry too much about jokes as you write your first draft. Okay, now you need to think about jokes, and that first joke on page 1 is very important. If you don’t have something funny right away, the Savvy Reader may not even bother to turn to page 2. Now, if you don’t have a solid joke there just yet, don’t worry. But you definitely must try to think of a good joke, or two or three, to start off the first page of your show.

You can’t let up after that either. The old rule of thumb in a multiple-camera show was three jokes per

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