Screenplay rewriting exercises: a notes memo and 3 pages to 1

Screenwriting courses grade the rewrite, not just the first draft. This guide covers the two rewriting exercises that do the most work: answering workshop notes with a revision memo, and cutting a three-page scene down to one. Each comes with page counts, a time box and a worked example.

Why schools treat rewriting as its own assignment

Look at published syllabi and the first draft is rarely the thing being graded. What gets graded is what you did with the notes on it. Some examples:

NYFA's course page also lists the questions its rewrite workshop opens with: how do you take notes, how do you look for the intent behind a note, and how do you deal with a note you disagree with? Those three questions are the first exercise below. The second exercise, compression, is the skill Brad Ingelsby, the creator of Mare of Easttown, credits AFI with in a quote on its screenwriting page: learning "how to get in and out of a scene quickly."

You don't need a class for either one, just a draft, three readers and a scene you wrote too long. Both open in ScripTao, which is free, needs no sign-up, and keeps your work in your browser.

Exercise 1: Rewrite from workshop notes

Deliverables: the notes you received, a one to two page revision memo, and a new draft saved under a new name. Time: 1–2 hours for a short scene or a 10-page script, plus the rewrite itself.

The skill being trained is triage. A workshop hands you a dozen reactions, some contradicting each other. The exercise makes you decide what to do with every one, and write the decision down so someone else can check your reasoning.

Step 1: Hear the notes without answering them

The first rule is: don't explain. A Filmmaker Magazine essay on taking notes says that if a reader didn't understand something, you shouldn't start explaining it to them. Just listen, write it down, and thank them. The essay also warns that trying to address every note is "the No. 1 rookie mistake," because it leads to "a mishmash of ideas, plot points and tone that has no character."

A Go Into The Story post suggests one all-purpose reply for the room: "Huh. That's an interesting idea. Something to think about, test it out, see how it plays on the page." It works because you haven't committed yet. You haven't tried the note on the page.

Step 2: Sort every note into one of four piles

Once you're home, copy every note into a list, including the ones you hated. Then give each one a verdict:

• Accept. You'll make the change, or a change that fixes the same problem.
• Decline. You won't, and you can say why in one sentence that refers to what the story is trying to do, not how you feel about the note.
• Combine. Two or more notes are symptoms of one problem, so one change answers them all.
• Postpone. The note is fair but belongs to a later draft, often a polish note on a scene that might get cut.

Two tests help with the sorting. The first is how many people said it. Paul Chitlik, author of the Michael Wiese book Rewrite, puts it plainly: if one person points out an issue, think about it. If two do, consider the change more strongly. If three say the same thing, "hit the keyboard."

The second test is the note behind the note. In the Filmmaker essay, an executive couldn't understand why a woman would wait until the night before her 30th wedding anniversary to say she was unhappy in her marriage. The writer's reading was that the quiet signs of her unhappiness earlier in the script hadn't registered. The problem wasn't the scene the note was about, it was everything leading up to it. When a note sounds wrong, ask what the reader experienced that made them write it.

Step 3: Write the memo

The memo is what gets graded, and how you'll remember later why the draft changed. Keep it to one or two pages, which is the length the Yale syllabus asks for:

1. One sentence on what the story is trying to do. Every decision below is measured against it.
2. A table of notes: the note, who gave it, your verdict and the planned change.
3. The notes you declined, one reason each.
4. The scenes or pages that will change, in order.
5. After the rewrite: what actually changed, and whether it worked. This is the part the Yale assignment asks for, the specific changes and why.

Here is a worked memo for the short script in the exercise box below, The Night Bus. Mara, in hospital scrubs, rides a night bus to the depot with a gift box. The route was her father's, and the driver knew him. It got three workshop notes:

Two notes became one change, which is often the best outcome: several readers describing one problem from different seats. And the declined note gets a reason tied to the story, not "I like it."

Step 4: Rewrite by goal, not from page one

John August warns that the biggest problem with most rewrites is starting at page one and tweaking forward, "moving commas." Instead, pick one goal from the memo, find every scene it touches, and fix those. Then move on to the next goal. For smaller revisions he suggests starting on paper: print the script, mark the cuts in colored pen, then "Save As… with a new file name" before you type anything. The old draft stays intact, and you can always compare the two.

If a note means structural surgery, rebuild the outline before the pages. Chitlik's habit is to redo his beat sheet after getting notes, because it's easier to test a change there than across a whole script. (Our step outline and reverse outline guide covers that tool.)

Exercise 2: Three pages into one

Deliverables: the original scene, the cut version at a third of the length or less, and a one-line note on where the scene now starts and ends. Time: 45 minutes. Set a timer, because the pressure is what forces the choices.

Most first drafts are long in two ways at once. Final Draft's guide to cutting pages without losing story calls them story length (too many scenes, subplots and beats) and writing length (too many words for the story you have). This drill works on writing length inside one scene, which is the part a writer can practise in a single sitting.

Where "enter late, leave early" comes from

The advice gets credited to more than one writer. Creative Screenwriting says the phrase was shortened from advice originally given by William Goldman and has also been attributed to David Mamet. The Story Department credits Goldman's "get in late and leave early" and notes that Mamet gets credit for it too. Whoever said it first, the test is simple. Find the first moment the scene can't do without and the last moment it needs, then treat everything outside those two points as a candidate for cutting. That's close to how Final Draft's enter-late guide puts it.

For a produced example, look at how Fight Club opens. The film, directed by David Fincher from Jim Uhls's screenplay of Chuck Palahniuk's novel, starts with Tyler Durden's gun barrel already in the narrator's mouth, with no build-up at all. The Story Department uses that scene as its model of entering late.

The order of cuts

Make the cuts in this order. The early passes remove the most words for the least risk.

1. Find the turn. Before you delete anything, write one sentence saying what changes in this scene. That's the one thing you can't cut. (If you can't write the sentence, the scene has a bigger problem. Try the goal, conflict, turn exercise first.)
2. Cut the head. Arrivals, greetings, small talk and looking for a seat. Final Draft's example turns a walk through a police station into a scene that opens with a woman already across from the detective, saying she lied about where she was.
3. Cut the tail. August's advice for trimming a script is to ask of every scene "what the earliest point is you could cut to the next scene," because "you'll likely find a lot of tails to trim." (How to cut pages.) Goodbyes, walks to the door, and characters talking about what just happened can usually go.
4. Cut what's said twice. When the action shows something, the dialogue shouldn't also say it. Don't let characters recap what the audience saw either. August's example is a scene that starts with "Are you sure it was blood?", which tells us the character already knows the details.
5. Compress what's left. Shorter action paragraphs and shorter speeches. Final Draft's example turns a five-sentence rant into "I don't care. I know what I saw."
6. Only then, the page tricks. Scott Myers of Go Into The Story lists mechanical savings: drop parentheticals, drop most CUT TOs, and rewrite lines that leave one word stranded on its own line. They're legitimate, but they aren't the exercise. August is firm that you shouldn't change line spacing, margins or fonts to hit a page count: "Don't cheat." (Final Draft's own blog suggests tighter line spacing as a last resort, so pros disagree on that one. For this drill, it counts as cheating.)

A worked example

Here's the beat list of an original, overwritten three-page scene set in a laundromat. Dev meets Noor, his ex, by chance.

What's left fits on a page:

INT. LAUNDROMAT - NIGHT. NOOR (30s) folds towels. DEV (30s), at the next machine, hasn't noticed her yet.

NOOR: I'm moving Sunday. Lisbon.

DEV: This Sunday.

He jams his shirts into the drum, too hard. A faded festival T-shirt snags on the door. Noor frees it. Looks at it. It's hers.

NOOR: Keep it.

She goes back to her towels. He shuts the door on it.

Nothing the audience needs is gone. The history is in the T-shirt and the hurt is in how he loads the machine: subtext doing the dialogue's old job. There's more on that in our subtext exercise, and the silent scene takes the same idea further.

When not to cut

Final Draft makes the fair counterpoint that sometimes the entrance is the scene, and sometimes the exit matters. A character returning home after twenty years away, or someone hesitating at the doorway after a breakup, may be the moment itself. Keep an entrance or exit when something happens in it. Cut it when it's only getting people on and off screen.

Scaling the drill up to a whole script

The same moves work on an over-length draft. August sorts the job by how much you need to cut:

• One or two pages: layout fixes alone will often do it, but he still says to look for real cuts.
• Five to ten pages: remove unnecessary set-ups, get out of scenes earlier, stop characters recapping, and tighten the third act, where writers tend to race to the finish.
• Ten or more: whole sequences go. On the first Charlie's Angels, he writes, the studio pulled ten pages out of the middle of the script late on a Friday, and he had until Monday morning to make the movie work without them.

Before you cut, do Final Draft's diagnostic: one sentence per scene, naming its purpose. If most of the sentences hold up, you have a writing-length problem, so run this drill scene by scene. If they don't, you have a story-length problem, and that's an outline job.

A one-week rewriting plan

1. Day 1: Hear the draft read aloud, as the Utah workshop does, with friends in the roles. Take notes and don't reply.
2. Day 2: Sort the notes into the four piles and write the memo.
3. Days 3–5: Rewrite one memo goal at a time in a new draft, then run the compression drill on its longest scene.
4. Day 6: Add "what changed and why" to the memo.
5. Day 7: Nothing. Chitlik's advice is to put a rewrite in a drawer before you look again.

For where these exercises fit in a full course, see the screenwriting exercises film schools assign.

FAQ

What does it mean to rewrite a script?

It means changing the story, not just the sentences. That includes structure, character, scenes and what each scene is for. A polish is the lighter pass on wording and format. The Yale syllabus marks the difference in its schedule, with a session on "Rewrites vs. Polishes." John August's test is whether you started from goals ("which scenes would need to change") or from page one.

How do you respond to script notes?

In the room, listen, write the note down, and don't defend the draft. Afterward, give every note a verdict: accept, decline with a reason, combine it with related notes, or postpone it. Look for the problem behind a note even when its suggested fix is wrong, and treat a note from three readers as more urgent than a note from one.

How many drafts should a screenplay have?

There's no fixed number. Courses build in at least one revision: Yale's short-script class workshops a first draft and grades a revised one, AFI's first-year workshop requires a second draft of the feature, and Sam Zalutsky writes that his NYU Tisch students wrote first, second and third drafts of their ten-page scripts. Chitlik's rule for when to stop is "repeat as necessary."

How many pages should a 2-hour movie script be?

About 120 is the upper limit, going by the rough rule of one page per minute. August calls that an oversimplification, but he also says any script over 120 pages "is automatically suspect." Final Draft gives 90 to 120 pages as the industry standard.

What is the 3-line rule in screenwriting?

We couldn't find an authoritative source that defines it, so be wary of treating any single number as a rule. The closest practice we could verify is August's: he keeps action and description paragraphs between two and six lines. Short paragraphs are also what step 5 of the compression drill produces.