I covered 6 scripts this month. Here’s the pattern I couldn’t ignore.
A reader’s note on the three craft patterns that surfaced across every script I covered this month — and what working writers can do about each one.
I covered 6 scripts in the last two weeks. Four features, two pilots. Writers at different levels — some early drafts, some polished work being prepped for submission.
Reading that many scripts back-to-back does something to pattern recognition. By the fifth and sixth, I stopped reacting to individual problems and started seeing the shape underneath them.
This month, the shape was unmistakable. Not one problem. Three. And most scripts had at least two of them.
Three Things That Kept Surfacing
The emotional beat that disappeared.
Multiple scripts had a major moment — a death, a confrontation, a turn — and immediately cut to the next scene. The event happened…. and the script moved on. We never got to see the character feel it.
This isn’t about adding a crying scene. Nobody likes tears for tears’ sake. It’s about a beat. A look. A moment alone with the weight of what just happened. That’s when an audience bonds to a character, not in the action, but in the stillness after it. When that moment disappears in favor of momentum, the emotional investment doesn’t land. The story kept moving, but the audience got left behind.
The supporting character who mattered — on paper.
Supporting characters who genuinely help drive the story are one of the most important keys to a script’s success (in almost all cases). And the ones I read this month were no different. Supporting characters drove key plot turns. They affected the lead’s journey. They were built into the architecture. But when their moment came, too often, there wasn’t much underneath them — no depth, no emotional anchor, no reason the audience had been given to care. They were purely structural. Useful to the story, invisible to the reader.
When a character’s action needs to land, you have to have built something for it to land on. It doesn’t take much, but the difference it makes is undeniable. One exchange, one unguarded moment, sometimes even a single line. But it has to be there before their ‘moment’ arrives. Otherwise, the action happens, the plot moves, and the audience feels only shallow emotions.
The page count. Yes, it matters.
Several scripts were noticeably outside industry standard. One was significantly over. Here’s the reality: page count is one of the first things a reader, agent, producer, anyone reading your script, looks at. It’s a signal they use to assess whether a writer knows the market. A 130-page feature tells a development exec something pretty loud before they’ve opened page one. A 78-page pilot does too. That might not be fair. But it’s accurate. And for indie writers especially — writers without representation, without existing relationships, without a produced credit that buys you the benefit of the doubt — you simply can’t afford to give someone a reason to hesitate before they’ve started reading. Make the decision to open your script as easy as possible.
Where Does This Come From?
It’s not lack of skill. Every writer I read this month is capable. In fact, more than one of these scripts were thoroughly deserving of strong consideration. The craft is there — dialogue, scene construction, formatting, structure. These are not beginners making beginner mistakes.
The emotional beat problem and the supporting character problem share a root: writers are trained to chase momentum, because a script that drags is a script that doesn’t often get optioned. Yet, momentum can be the enemy of weight.
Most craft education focuses on forward motion. We focus on scenes that turn, structure that escalates, sequences that drive. And rightfully so. These writers had all of that. The problem is that forward motion, unchecked, can skip right past the very moments it has been building toward. A script needs to stop sometimes. Not often, but sometimes. Just long enough to let a character exist inside a moment before it passes. The audience isn’t just watching to see what happens next. They’re watching to see how your protagonist lives through what happens.
Supporting characters suffer the same pressure. When you’re constructing a scene architecturally — who needs to be here, what needs to happen — it’s easy to cast a character as a mechanism and never ask whether they feel like a person. Creating depth and emotional agency for these smaller characters makes their impact land that much harder and can even create a character the audience will never forget. Think McConaughey in Wolf of Wall Street, or John Turturro in The Big Lebowski.
The page count problem is different. That one is usually — trigger warning — fear. It’s fear of cutting something you worked hard for, or submitting before the draft is truly ready. It reads differently to a producer than it feels to the writer.
“The emotional beat problem and the supporting character problem share a root: writers are trained to chase momentum. Yet, momentum can be the enemy of weight.”
Here’s What We Can Do About It
For the emotional beats:
Go back and do a dedicated pass looking only at your protagonist’s biggest story moments. After each one, ask — do they get a beat to actually feel this? Not in dialogue. Not in montage. A human moment. Often all it takes is one look, one silence, one private reaction. If it’s not there, you can add it in a few lines. That addition will make everything before it hit harder.
For supporting characters:
Start with a list. A list of every character whose action drives a plot turn. For each one, ask: has the audience been given a reason to care about this person before the moment their action is needed? If the answer is no, find a scene, or create one, that comes before that turn and gives them a moment of humanity. Not backstory. Not explanation. Just a glimpse of who they are independent of what they’re being used for.
For page count:
Know your format targets before your next draft begins. Feature: 90–120 pages, with 95–110 being the range where no one raises an eyebrow. One-hour pilot: 45–65 pages. Thirty-minute pilot: 22–35 pages. If you’re outside those ranges, you need a specific creative reason. Not a preference, a reason — and it needs to be legible in the writing itself.
The Thing We’re Trying to Do
This is what we’re building with dev|cut. Not tell writers their scripts are good or bad. Not produce a report card of passive judgement. We want to help identify that thing that’s missing. The thing that, once named, makes the path forward clearer and most of all, actionable.
Every script I covered this month had a writer who knew their story. They’d done the work. What they needed wasn’t more diagnosis. They needed the unlock — focused development analysis that doesn’t just name the problem, it maps the way through it.
That’s coverage worth having.
Lot’s more to come. Stay tuned with us.
— Brian Hanford, Writer & Founder, dev|cut. · devcut.io
← Back to The Reader’s Note