Question: How to approach final pass on a script?

Open forum question from Boxing Grizzlies:

One thing I was wondering if you could cover is what your approach is when you do a final pass on your script before handing it in. Not checking for typos, but more for a dialogue pass or making sure your action lines crackle.

When I do a pass on dialogue or try and read through and make sure the big picture of my script is working, I usually get caught up in pointless line edits and end up losing momentum and focus halfway through my script.

Three suggestions, two of them involve reading aloud:

* Take a highlighter pen and mark every verb in scene description. Then try to find the strongest action verbs you can to replace weaker ones. Instead of “he walks into the room,” why not ambles, barges, stumbles, staggers, flops, trips, dances, crashes? You can even make up words. In Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, screenwriter William Goldman uses this as a verb: “barrel-asses.” Not exactly sure what it means, but it conveys chaotic action and in the context of the scene is a great descriptor.

BTW, highlighting verbs isn’t my original idea, rather something I picked up from screenwriter Larry Ferguson and posted about previously here.

There are over 170,000 words in OED, apparently over 9,000 of them are verbs according to this thread. With that many verbs from which to choose, a writer has no excuse other than laziness for using a weak one instead of a strong one.

* Print out the dialogue for each of your individual characters and read them aloud. The point here is if you read aloud each side of dialogue for Character A back-to-back, then Character B, and so on, you will get a clear sense of how they talk. If you don’t hear anything distinctive about their form of communication, that suggests you need to dig into their character more deeply to ‘hear’ them better. Also by doing this exercise, you can compare and contrast this character’s dialogue from that one.

I know that the Movie Magic Screenwriter software gives you the option to print out an individual character’s dialogue. Final Draft users, can you do that as well?

* Read aloud the entire script from FADE IN to FADE OUT. Every word. Reading aloud scene description and dialogue will expose convoluted lines, clunky action, and awkward dialogue. And if you find yourself getting bored reading a section, then perhaps this suggests that the section is, you know… boring. Time to punch up that scene! Finally, it’s a great way to track the pace of your script and the balance of ‘active’ scenes to ‘reflective’ scenes.

Those are three suggestions. I’ll bet GITS readers will have more to add in comments.

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