The Ride Along by Kevin Wright - Action, Adventure - A touching script about two high school seniors to be that are about to embark on a life changing year of becoming EMTs. The Ride Along shows innocence, realism, and naivety clash with terror and fear, producing maturity beyond our heroes years, proving that friendship is one of the greatest forces on Earth. Packed with action and sorrow with a touch of comedy sprinkled in, see what it takes for these two kids to grow up and become EMTs.  133 pages - pdf, format

You've got some work to do here, Kevin.  

Firstly, lose all the "date started," "date completed" and all that from the title page.  All you should have there is your title, written by and your contact info.  WGA reg # is optional.  

Secondly, you've got to ditch all the scene numbers and cut to's and other such direction.  Unless you plan on producing and shooting this script yourself, your priority is to show the reader your storytelling ability, how well you write, not how you'd block a scene, not how you'd edit a cut.  All that stuff is for the director to worry about, and as far as you, the writer, are concerned, it just gets in the way of the story.  How can we know how well you write a story with all these superfluous obstacles to trip us up?

Thirdly, lose all the colons after the character's name during dialogue.  Also, there's no space between the name of the character speaking and their dialogue.

Fourthly, your action/narratives are overlong.  Four lines or less, please.  Nothing puts off a reader like huge chunks of text.  It makes reading a chore.  And speaking of action/narratives, lose all the CAPPED stuff.  If it's an item that has a bearing on the scene, sure, cap it.  But look at your description of the EMT class room.  You go into far more detail than is necessary, capping hither and thither, and all that unnecessary detail does nothing more than take up space on the page.  "Half the room hosts a collection of desks; the other half is stacked with EMT training gear" is detail enough.  

Sixthly, leave out unfilmables.  "Two weeks have passed" is a detail which cannot be filmed.  And it's also redundant, considering that with the very next sentence you show a calendar which clearly shows a date that is two weeks later.  That's the better approach.  

Seventhly (is that even a word? ), no past tense.  "Kevin and Chloe just finished up a run around the park.  It was pretty empty for a mid-day on a Saturday."  How do we know Kevin and Chloe just finished up a run around the park?  We weren't there to see them running and then stop.  So you'd need to describe their state.  "Kevin and Chloe chill on a park bench, both drenched in post-run sweat."  And "It was pretty empty for a mid-day on a Saturday" is yet another unfilmable.  How are we to know how empty or full the park would be on any given day, let alone a specific time on a Saturday, both of which are details we have no way of knowing as written?  

Eighthly (almost done, I promise), cut back some on the "we see"s.  You'll get a lot of differing opinions on that; some folks say it's redundant, telling us we're seeing something when we already know we see it because it's in the screenplay.  But really, there's no real harm in it -- if you use it in moderation.  A lot of writers tend to use "we see" as a crutch, because it lets them bypass having to come up with a more creative way of delivering a visual.  Don't fall into that habit.

Brass tacks: Screenwriting is every bit as much about knowing what NOT to write as it is knowing what TO write.  My advice is to bone up more on the craft of spec screenwriting, then give this puppy another stab.  Clean it up, whittle it down, pick and choose your descriptive words so that they better deliver the essence of a room or person or action, rather than weigh it down with technical, and trivial, detail.  

Best of luck.  Keep writing.

- Lon

Quoted from Lon You've got some work to do here, Kevin.   - Lon

I think Lon gave you a lot of solid advice. His checklist pretty much echoes the problems I had reading your story. I would also add that I read to about page 12 (you didn't number pages so I'm guessing) before any remote type of "action" occurred when Chloe responds to the heart attack, which isn't a good thing for an action/adventure script. Way too much setup. It reads more like a drama, if that's what you're truly going for.

The good news is that I noticed on your title page that there is only a month between the time your first draft and this latest version. It takes most of us months and months to get a polished final draft, so worry not! You just have more revision ahead of you. Definitely get into the action quicker unless you think it should be more of a drama.

Hey, I have to agree with the majority of what Lon touched on. Your prose description is too over blown, a good rule to write by when describing things is to just break it down to only what it is you want the reader/viewer to experience. Overall you have some great ideas, it just kind of meanders particularly in the latter half of the second act. It just needs good polish. Good luck.

-L.

Thanks for the critiques. I'm almost done formatting it correctly (painstaking work), then I have a few changes that I want to make that I believe will improve it. Plus cutting back on the scene details has shaved nearly ten pages, which I like, because I felt my ending was too rushed, and not to my liking (Didn't really want to go past 130). And thank you Manowar. This script is absolutely a drama, and not an action. I have it listed incorrectly.

I'll make my changes, and see how I like it.

Kevin,
Something that may help with that formatting issue is free screenwriting software. It really helped me.
try: Celtx or Trelby   I think those are really good.  If you are done with this one, these may help with the next script.