Anatomy of a rewrite — “Tentpoles”
JANUARY 18TH, 2016 — POST 014
This piece is a continuation from a kind of journal/instructional on rewriting a screenplay. Part one can be found here.
The thing with prepping a rewrite is that the better a job I do, the worst about my script I will feel. I give notes to myself like someone else wrote it; I’m honest with myself. If I’ve ripped apart every aspect of my draft, found every hole, noticed every loose thread that could be tugged to unravel by a light breeze, I can sometimes feel overwhelmed by the task in front of me. Wouldn’t it just be easier for me to write something completely new at this point?
Probably. But I’m not writing something new. I’m making something better and I know this is the real work. For me, my own morale is what demands my attention most at this stage. The most effective way I’ve found at dealing both with my attitude to the now-tattered script and the script itself is to pitch the tent back up.
I do this by first identifying what I call my “tentpoles”. These are moments in the script that I can rely on, that multiple readings have only worked to strengthen my feelings about them. For my style personally, these tend to be tight set pieces, ones in which the pace is rapid, the characters are compelled through the action out of survival, and my writing for the most part gets out of the way. I know that these are the few valuable chunks of paper that I want to hold on to and carry through to the new draft. Often these are act breaks, parts of the script that the outlining process ensured lucidity in during the writing. For me, it’s more likely the lead ups to the act breaks, specifically the second half of act two.
I like to slap these tentpoles down onto index cards physically. I want to see the key destinations that’ll mark this now-worn-out map. This isn’t to say that from here on the entire structure of the thing is reconfigured, but rather these key sequences (or even single scenes) will be the achors for the orbit of other moments. Planting the tentpoles specifically allows me to refocus the general movement of the story and foreground what needs to be achieved by when. Because I can’t sit still long enough to extensively outline my first drafts, these rewrites often become quite a mechanical and manacling process of greasing the story engine to run better, weeding out all the impurities the first draft carried along with it.
This is not to say that these tentpoles become inscrutable, however. Ultimately through all of this, the “thesis” or “argument” of the movie is my guiding criterion. I want to stay open to the possibility that everything can change. But I’ve got to start somewhere. And feeling good about the work I’ve done so far goes a long way to getting me to start.
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