Tom! What a treat to find a guest post from you here. Congratulations on finishing your draft! Oddly enough, I was just taking a break from rewriting (my sitcom pilot) to check in at GITS and refresh my brain. Thank you for the very timely post. Does spring turn a young man's thoughts to rewriting? Because we've been having some rousing discussions on rewriting at the forum lately, too. I'm with you: I love rewriting. And it is SO MUCH EASIER than getting a first draft on the page. Dinner's here but I want to come back and read this post closely. Thank you again for the guest post!

Okay, back from dinner. > “The first draft of everything is shit.” – Ernest Hemingway > Chill out, Ernest. It’s not that bad. Just so you know, this made me do a spit take. (Note to self: put down tea before reading Tom's posts.) > But it is up to you to set the agenda, to use their reactions to form your plan for how to proceed with the next draft of your script. Amen. When I started writing, I GUTTED my work in response to notes, and wound up with a dog's breakfast. I finally learned that I own the work, and I needed to react to notes with discretion. I'm more confident in my ability to find what's useful in notes and what serves my vision now than when I started. (But I still have good days and bad days with this as I suspect we all do.) The positive side of that experience is that I go out of my way to verify my understanding of the author's intentions when I'm doing notes for friends and give notes on THAT project, not the imaginary, divergent version I cook up in my own head. > Try to see the movie you put on the page as you read. I find some people do this naturally and some people seem to struggle with it--and it's certainly reflected in the notes they give. Is it something you've been able to do innately? Do you have any advice on how to cultivate this skill? (I'm a visual reader myself, and I think you especially need to be for comedy, but I find I have the "how do you read that way" conversation with people fairly often.) I appreciate your point that reader-friends have different strengths. I know a lot of writers, but not all of them can read comedy. In fact I have a genius writer friend and every script I've ever shown him, he sends back with a note that says, "Is this supposed to be funny? I didn't laugh." (I keep him around to make sure I don't get too big for my britches!) But when a friend is kind enough to give me notes (and I'm cashing in a lot of notes favors this month so I mean this from the heart), I really appreciate whatever strengths they do bring to the read. A question: how far do you get on your own in rewrites before you feel it's useful to get notes from other people? Second question: do you ask readers questions about the script up front (e.g., "Do you think the set piece on page 22 falls flat?") or do you just send the script out cold? Or does it depend on the project and the reader? Thanks again for the great post, Tom.

[...] Of course it does – writing is rewriting. Professional screenwriter Tom Benedek talks about a project he’s working on and his thoughts on rewriting: I just finished the first draft of a script that I have been talking about, thinking about, structur... [...]

[...] Does your script need a rewrite? [...]