[Watch the video interview on Youtube here]
Film Courage: What are the biggest mistakes you see in screenplays over and over again?
Cody Smart, Writer/Script Doctor/Teacher: I would say that the first one is formatting. I hate when I open a script and I immediately know you don’t know how to write. Then it comes down to passive voice and it’s all is, are or ing, things like that just not moving the story forward. But then it comes to bigger things, those are just the very few things that you notice. When you open it and you skim and Oh, they don’t know how to format. They are not using active tenses.
When the characters are not fleshed out, that’s one of the things I immediately see or when the protagonist’s goal doesn’t connect to the turning points, where there’s no clear central conflict and you’re just giving me vignettes of scenes that are not connected and they’re not leading to something.
I think that dialogue where all of the characters sound the same is another thing I see a lot. Granted that’s one of the hardest things I believe for writers is to nail dialogue and make characters sound different because obviously everyone talks just one way so it’s hard to talk different people but that’s an art form that you really need to work on and people watch and study the greats and how they do it and how they make the characters sound different and why writing your character bio is so important because that’s where you can figure out how they say things different. I think that those are the biggest things I find.
If we go deeper into little things, the antagonist is not fleshed out and they’re just the stereotype of the bad guy or the supporting characters are sort of forgotten…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
BIO:
Cody Smart is an independent writer and script doctor from Chile. She holds degrees in English Literature & Linguistics, Screenwriting, Development and Producing. She worked as a script analyst for Sony, she’s a judge for multiple script and film competitions, she’s written some award-winning shorts, she’s head of the coverage department at a script hosting site and she does a bi-monthly vlog with tips for Screenwriters for Story Data. She takes pride in helping writers take their work to the next level.
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