Quoted from George Willson I knock out 20-40 pages a day

Holy cow!

I had a pretty interesting meeting with a story consultant today. We were talking about stories in terms of video games, but a lot of what we discussed can also be applied to screenwriting.

In terms of story, we talked about the importance of deep plotting, detailed backstories, character histories, relationships etc and how much of that actually ends up in the final product. The key point of the discussion was allowing the audience to work things out for themselves by essentially joining the dots provided by the writer. It's a case of the reader creating a perception of the story that matches, or even trancends, the story the author intended. The trick is to provide just enough exposition for the audience to fill in the blanks without ever becoming confused.

He gave an example from a pen and paper role playing game where he was telling a story, describing a scene, and one of the players responded with certain story details that he'd never actually verbalized, yet he had written them down. The player had filled in the story himself without even realizing he'd done so.

Definitely some food for thought.

Perhaps you should look at your treatment and hack away at anything that is not "essential" to understanding the story you're telling. Anything that is implied elsewhere may not require its own scene. You may end up cutting some of your favorite scenes, but it'll be a helpful exercise in streamlining your story.

I've actually cut (read: never wrote) several scenes already that were understood, understood, or explained elsewhere. One thing that helped my train of thought was watching the deleted scenes with the commentary on for the most recent Zorro movie (whatever it was called). The cut scenes were okay, but what the director kept saying through each one of them was "we have all the information in this scene at this other point of the film so we cut it". When I thought about it, I found it to be very educational. Some scenes had a lot of work done of them before hey were cut, but it boiled down to "do we need it to tell the story?" Interesting.