Chapter | sixteen

Extremely Specific Mistakes: Hey You! Yes, You

Everybody's got their own personal bugbears.

Depiction of videogames in scripts is one of mine. If the only game-playing character in your script is the protagonist's snot-faced kid brother, and his favorite game has some desperately cynical title like Hooker Killer 3000, I may – fair warning – suffer a rage blackout and wake up in a pile of shredded script pages.

Okay, maybe not. But I will get the feeling that you're not exactly my kind of person, and I'll lose a little of the carefully built rapport I had with your script. Every reader has something different that sets them off – a specific problem or three that they love to hate every time it crops up in a screenplay. Your job ...

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