Screenwriters Editing and Proofreading Services

A reader gets through your script in seventy minutes and forms a view in ten pages. What makes them stop is almost never the story — it is the accumulated sense of a writer who does not know where scenes begin. The character arrives, parks, greets the receptionist, waits, is called in, sits down, and on page four says the thing the scene exists for. Every one of those beats is plausible and none of them is the scene.

We work on what screenwriters produce — feature and television scripts, pilots and series bibles, treatments, outlines and beat sheets, loglines and one-page pitches, scene work and revision drafts, sample scripts for staffing and general meetings, competition and lab submissions, short film scripts, and the material that goes to agents, producers and script executives. Our editors work on where each scene starts and where it stops.

Entering late and leaving early is the discipline that separates a script that reads fast from one that reads competently, and it is applied inconsistently even by writers who know the rule. We work through scripts so each scene begins at the last possible moment before the thing that makes it necessary, since arrival, greeting and settling are almost never that moment; so it ends on the line or image that changes something, cutting whatever follows, because a scene that plays out its own aftermath tells the reader you did not trust the moment; so every scene can be named by what changes in it, given that a scene with no change is either two scenes' worth of information or nothing; so exchanges that exist to convey plot are given a second job — a disagreement, a refusal, something being decided — as information delivered in a scene where nothing else is happening reads as an errand; so entrances and exits are checked across the whole script, since this is where the fat accumulates evenly and invisibly; and so the first line of dialogue in each scene is examined, because if it is a greeting the scene almost certainly starts later than you have started it. Scripts cut this way get read to the end.

Everything you send us stays confidential, including unproduced scripts, pitches and material in development. We are editors rather than agents, producers or script executives, and we offer no view on whether a script will sell or be made. What we can do is find every scene that starts on page three of itself.