3 Biggest Mistakes Writers Make With Their Second Draft – Shannan E. Johnson

Film Courage: Where does the second draft begin?

Writer/Instructor and Script Consultant Shannan E. Johnson (The Professional Pen): Your second draft should begin when your first draft ends and you go off and do something else. Go away, stop looking at it, take your mind off of it which I know is very, very hard but take your mind off of it. Go do something else for at least a week. Give your brain an opportunity to rest and then come back, re-read it first before you start writing because you should be giving your own notes. You might not know how to give notes like a script consultant or know how to give notes like an executive but something in you is telling you that something’s not working and so you need to track what those things are. Read your script and then start making notes for yourself about Okay, this isn’t clear here or This gets a little confusing here, etcetera so that when you’re going back for your revision you can address those things. If you don’t know how to do that, you’re probably going to go back because you need to do a proofreading pass. You need to do a formatting pass. You might know that you want to look at the dialogue again and make sure that it’s not as on-the-nose or in some places not too long and things like that. Not everyone goes into their second draft with the same intention. If you’ve been doing this long enough then you already know…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).