Destiny by Todd Martin - Short, Horror - When a mysterious man suffering from amnesia stumbles into a bar one night the life of an abused woman that works there is changed forever. 28 pages - pdf, format

Writer interested in feedback on this work

This needs so much work.

The title page has no info.

There are massive chunks of action, you need to try, at the very least, to keep it to four lines or less.

There are also big blocks of dialogue. The bigger issue is that this is a 27 page short, so quite long, and it is literally almost all dialogue. Visually that is not going to be great for anyone.

Some 'we sees' which you should try avoid, show us don’t tell us.

Lot of passive writing. I’m not going to go into what that means, there are tons of articles you could read on it. Some on this site as well.

Best advice would be for you to take a look at a few more scripts, take note of how lean the writing generally is.

Good luck with it.

Todd: There is a lot wrong here - check out a few scripts to get the feel

Warren and Dave,

Solid advice on action slugs. Four lines or less. (more or less). Same for dialogue.  (I recorded a convo with The Fat Kid, no more than ten words per person for 1/2 an hour).

The short - my bad.  I arbitrarily use 60 pages or less for shorts, but that is a discussion for someone else's thread.

Big question - which scripts should we be looking at ? Award season is coming and there are a lot of shooting scripts coming out.  What spec scripts should Todd look at, either professional or not?

Todd, that fact that Warren and Dave read your work and responded speaks to the fact you have something.  

Get some more feed back and look at your action slugs and dialog. I think they can be tightened up.

- Don

Personally, one of my absolutely favourite scripts is The Perks of Being a Wallflower. It is available on this site.It does break a few rules that people will tell you to stick to but it is just brilliant.

For a non pro script check out Corpse Flower in the horror section.

Some notes.

this is a straightforward, standard fare story.  You give us the damsel in distress, the woman-beating bully, the cowed crowd, the well-meaning bartender.  I think you need to find a way to make this story yours.  There are other issues with writing and dialogue, but they stem from the story idea itself.  If you're going to write a werewolf story, find a way to twist it so it's something a bit different.  

Best
Richard

Quoted from Don Warren and Dave, Solid advice on action slugs. Four lines or less. (more or less). Same for dialogue.  (I recorded a convo with The Fat Kid, no more than ten words per person for 1/2 an hour). The short - my bad.  I arbitrarily use 60 pages or less for shorts, but that is a discussion for someone else's thread. Big question - which scripts should we be looking at ? Award season is coming and there are a lot of shooting scripts coming out.  What spec scripts should Todd look at, either professional or not? Todd, that fact that Warren and Dave read your work and responded speaks to the fact you have something.   Get some more feed back and look at your action slugs and dialog. I think they can be tightened up. - Don

I think he should read both a pro, well-known script and an amateur one.

Although I did not like the movie - I loved the script for "Gone Girl"

A great short video on the techniques used in the script is here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF3lFPW4E1o

I thought the analysis was pretty brilliant.

I would also recommend that they read any winner from an OWC. They are all pretty solid and easy to get through.