Entry 7 On to the Advanced Class
by Aaron Walker Sr.
(EDITOR’S NOTE: The Story So Far starts HERE)
One thing the writing class experience taught me was the importance of planning before you write. A little preparation in the beginning helps to prevent writer’s block later. But as I mentioned last week, my failure to plan made the revision process difficult.
The first task Daymond, Lloyd Walker Jr. (our artist! and an outstanding one!), and I embarked upon was to go through the script and get rid of any extraneous scenes. You know, those scenes that are kind of just there, but don’t really propel the story forward. And believe me, there were a lot of unnecessary scenes to remove.
The next task, was to reduce the wordy dialogue and action descriptions. You would be surprised how much space we eat up due to “over wording” the things that we write. The name of the game is telling as much story in as few words as possible… after all, we’re not writing novels here; but you still have to make the script interesting to read, and most of all, it has to make sense.
To any writer out there I say: embrace the rewriting process. Don’t view rewriting as something we do because we failed, but view it as the process by which we refine our great ideas. Though we were able to reduce the page count significantly, there was still a lot of work to be done. So we knew there would be a round two in the advanced class for us!
Next Week: Round 2: The Pains of Cutting…