How to tell if your script is good or bad?
How to tell if your script is good or bad ???
Show it to 10 people.. and they’ll all have varying opinions. None of the opinions will match, and the exercise would leave you even more confused, rather than giving you clarity of thought.
People will say that it’s nice.. but needs to be improved upon.. where ?? how ??
Someone will say the script kept me hooked till last page.. but ending was a disappointment.. okay, i’ll change the ending.. but what doesn’t work about this ending ??
Dialogues are very light.. so should they be heavy?.. Not heavy but deep.. But I don’t want them to sound like dialogues, this film requires an everyday kind of a lingo..
But on second thoughts yeah maybe my dialogues are crappy.. but then how come the person X liked only the dialogues and not the narrative structure.. while the person Y’s case was vice-versa.
Whose opinion should I take and why? Rejecting them all and going purely by my instincts.. is that equivalent to vanity or arrogance? Accepting them all, would make my script something else and not what I had set out to write.
At the end of the day what I’m concerned about is THE FILM. Plenty of money is going to be put into it.. so the written word better be worth each penny.. plenty of hopes are invested in it.. so the film better be good..
Is there no way to avoid making a bad script into a film? But then who has the right to say its bad?
Probably one isn’t ready to accept rejection after the script stage.. it’s only after people have seen the film and said what sh*t you have made.. does one get the point.
So what does one do..?? Self assess?? Take some opinions.. throw some opinions..??
However, at the end of the day what matters is that the film gets made. No matter how crappy it turns out to be.. at least one tried.. with the whole of heart and soul.
Maybe the 22nd century will see a software.. which will give the writer an exact scientific analysis of his/her script.. dialogues 45% good.. act two “URGENT ATTENTION NEEDED less than 37%”… setup 85%.. if wishes were horses!
But then won’t it make the whole process very dull and boring? Maybe the beauty of script writing lies in its imperfections. That’s what makes those black and white pages so colorful. There are no fixed rules, only guidelines. You try and you fail. You explore. You succeed.
That’s how one gets to see different scripts. Unique scripts. Going by just the software, they all might end up looking alike. Unless ofcourse.. the software has the brain of an Einstein and the heart of an Aristotle.
So that brings us back to the basic question.. how to tell if your script is good or bad? I guess it’s easy to identify a good/bad script.. the problem lies somewhere in between.. an average script struggling to get out of its mediocrity and trying to become good. That’s a battle that the writer better win before the shoot begins.
How to win the battle? I’m exploring… you do too..!
Tags: Critic, Opinion, Screenplay, Script
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
I’m reminded of the well-known satirical novel by Robert Escarpit – The Literatron by this post. I have not read the novel but just a summary of its review is reproduced. It has a deep resemblence with this idea of 22nd century software.
“The Literatron is more or less a machine for creating texts similar to a computer. The idea of its creators was to generate the perfect novel based on the best images from world literature. In response to the highest of expectations, the machine produced a bestseller – Virgin and Typesetter! When the Literatron was asked to compose a political speech the outcome was even more scandalous. After processing the entire history of political rhetoric the machine spewed out a series of gaffs such as: “This politics thing the more it changes the more it stays the same… There are no two ways about it, the clever people are the most stupid of all… All you have to do is hang a few of them (politicians) and things will improve…”. The speech generated by the literatron was welcomed with raptures by the electorate and the politician whose job it was to make it quickly became a star. Every attempt to deviate from the absurd scenario led to vigorous disapproval.
It is more important to look on the principles on which the machine operated. Its aim was universality and in the process it purged all nuances, simplified the meaning and looked for an arithmetical mean. The aim was for the text to reach the widest possible audience. The greatest irony was that a message meant for all was in practice a message for no one. This undermined its purpose, since it would have left its audience completely indifferent. The literatron is clearly a metaphor for populism as a leading principle of the political machine. However, populism works. If it didn’t, politicians wouldn’t resort to it so often.”
Story is over…
what does this article mean? what is the purpose? where are the insights? people who read and write on pfc are educated enough to understand that software cant write scripts…no amount of AI can create what human mind can…you write something only if you have something to say, a point to make…o’ wise please dont bother…
“….you write something only if you have something to say, a point to make…”
A certain Henry Miller would disagree with you on that.
The thing is, the moment you write something, you say it.
I guess you were misled by the title of the post perhaps?
To “Struggler”: How to tell if your script is good or bad?
If you like it, it’s good. If you don’t, do another draft. And another, and another…. and lo! One fine day you’ll have the perfect script.
it doesn’t take a genius to tell that this article is crappy. how did it get here? what was the point of this senseless write up? a complete waste of time.
Its a non-issue. Because just because people are not the same, dont think the same, dont like or dislike the same things. Only thing to do is to continuously strive to evolve and ignore everyone, except producer/financier.
Dude, if your script is as good as this writeup, do another draft.
it’s not as much about whether it’s good or bad as it is about whether it can sell…
There’s a hilarious take on the subject in a film I saw the other day again.. The Big Picture starring Kevin Bacon. perhaps that’s something you might relate to.
And I really see no reason to be harsh on this writeup. Clearly some of you are geniuses but pl don’t go around flaunting that..
I can understand the confusion.
Once a writer friend of mine sent his script to me for notes. I sent him a detailed review with suggestions for potential changes. A few weeks later, he sent me a mail forwarding the notes he got from another fellow writer. Interestingly, all the suggestions by this other friend were exactly opposite to what I suggested.
That day I realised, never take script notes literally. Trust your own intuition.
This is a kindergarten level article. Even the writing isn’t powerful. Who says we need to read stuff like this?
It’s all subjective! It’s never just black or white.