Editors for screenplays and TV pilots: what we check

A script edit checks how the pages look and read (format and white space), whether each scene starts late and ends on a turn, whether the dialogue has subtext, and, for a TV pilot, whether the first ten pages prove the show can run for years. A screenplay is read differently from a novel, and that single fact drives almost every note. Prose readers chose your book. Script readers are professionals working through a stack, and many of them are looking for a reason to stop, so a script often has to win them over in its first ten pages where a novel might get fifty.

That changes what an edit is for. Here's how we approach scripts and pilots.

1. Format discipline is a credibility signal

Nobody passes on a script because one slug line was formatted wrong. But format errors cluster, and a reader clocks the cluster in seconds. Getting it right is free, so get it right.

The ones that mark a script as amateur:

Camera direction. CUT TO:, WE PAN ACROSS, ANGLE ON. Unless you're directing it, these read as someone who's seen scripts rather than read them. Write what's on screen and leave the editing to the cut.
Directing the actors in parentheticals. (angrily) is a note to an actor who hasn't been cast about a line that should already be angry. Parentheticals are for when the reading is genuinely counterintuitive, or for a physical beat mid-speech. Otherwise cut them.
Unfilmable action. "He remembers the summer his father left." You can't photograph a memory. It's the most common thing I mark on amateur scripts, and it's usually a symptom of a bigger problem: the writer knows the interiority and hasn't found the external behavior for it.
Character-introduction blocks. Name in caps, age, and one thing that tells us who they are, preferably something we could actually see. Three lines of backstory in an action paragraph is prose, not screenwriting.
Dense action blocks. More than four lines in a row and the eye slides off.
Page count. A spec feature far past the usual 90 to 120 pages signals "this hasn't been through a draft" before anyone reads a word. For pilots, commonly cited ranges are roughly 28 to 35 pages for a half-hour and 50 to 65 for an hour, and those bands move with the market, so check what's current for your target.

2. White space is a pacing instrument

Writers coming from prose take longest to absorb this one. On a script page, the shape of the text is felt as rhythm. Short paragraphs and short speeches read fast, blocks read slow, whatever the content.

So a script edit reads the pages as pictures first. Where does the page go grey? A grey page in the middle of a chase is wrong even if every sentence in it is good, and a page of short exchanges in a slow, dread-building scene is wrong for the opposite reason.

You can do a version of this yourself in ten minutes. Print the script, put the pages on a table and look at them from six feet away. You won't be able to read a word, and you'll see your pacing.

3. Scene economy: late in, early out

Everyone's heard "get in late, get out early," and almost nobody applies it far enough. The practical version:

The first line of the scene should be the first line that couldn't have been guessed. Cut the arrival, the greeting, the sitting down, the ordering of coffee. The reader supplies all of that for free.
The last line should be the turn, not the reaction to the turn. Cut the exit and the "okay, well, see you." The audience holds the beat in the cut better than you can write it.
Every scene needs a turn. Something is different at the end than at the start: a relationship, an intention, a piece of information, a balance of power. A scene with no turn is a scene where people talked, and those get cut in the room, so cut them yourself.

The most useful single pass on a feature draft is to number every scene, write its turn in five words, and find the ones where you can't. That list is your rewrite.

4. Dialogue, the script version

Script dialogue fails differently from prose dialogue because there's no narration to hide behind. We give three notes again and again.

Everyone sounds the same. Cover the character names and read a page. If you can't tell who's talking, you have one character with several faces. Differentiate by what people want and how directly they'll ask for it, not by verbal tics.

On the nose. Characters say exactly what they mean and feel (on-the-nose dialogue), but real people talk around things. Subtext is what a script has instead of interiority, so it's holding the wall up rather than hanging on it.

Talking wallpaper. Realistic chit-chat that isn't doing anything. We wrote a whole piece on fixing it, and it applies to scripts as much as prose, maybe more, because a script has nowhere else to put the story.

5. What a TV pilot has to prove

A feature has to be a good story. A pilot has a harder job: it has to be a good story and make a case for a hundred more hours. Those pull in different directions, and most amateur pilots only do the first.

On the page, a pilot has to show:

The engine. What generates a story every week? A premise won't do it, you need an engine. "A chemistry teacher has cancer" is a premise. "A man who must keep cooking meth and keep his family from finding out" is an engine, because it produces conflict indefinitely. If a reader can't describe episode four after reading your pilot, there's no engine.
The character's flaw, in action, in the first ten pages. Not stated, but demonstrated by a choice that costs them something.
The show's tone, unmistakably and early. Tone confusion in a pilot is fatal because the buyer can't picture the shelf it sits on.
The ensemble's relationships, specifically who's in conflict with whom by default. Relationships that only exist to be pleasant generate nothing.
A self-contained story that resolves while leaving the engine running. A pilot that's all setup and ends on a hook is a first act, not a pilot.

Structurally, pilots aren't act ones. The note we give most often on amateur pilots is that they spend their whole length getting the character to the position the series premise describes, so the show effectively starts on page 58. Unless the show is genuinely about the transformation, start closer to the steady state and let the reader watch the machine run.

Cold opens earn their place when they establish tone or plant the episode's question. They don't when they're a disconnected teaser bolted on because the format seemed to require one.

6. The ten-page problem

Because of how scripts get read, the first ten pages do a disproportionate amount of work: they establish tone, introduce the protagonist behaving characteristically, pose the question, and show that the writer can write. Most amateur scripts spend those ten pages on setup, which is exactly the material a reader would grant you for free if you'd just start.

The blunt diagnostic is to find the first thing in your script that a reader couldn't have predicted from your logline. If it's on page nineteen, your script starts on page nineteen.

What we've worked on

Our feature The Runner ranked in the top ten amateur screenplays of 2015 on Scriptshadow, and the short The Golden Stone was a semi-finalist in the 168 Write of Passage contest in 2015. Both are listed with sample pages on the portfolio page. We've also done public developmental script edits, including Scriptshadow Amateur Offerings entries Notorious and Helldorado and I Shall Be Released and 42 Days.

Getting notes

The Get Edits page has the current options and rates for scripts, including free live edits on Twitch, and it links an example of what our written notes look like if you want a sense of them before committing.