The Passion Polish

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Many years ago, my frequent writing partner Kristy Dobkin introduced me to what she called the passion polish. She got it from her first professional mentor, Frank South, who was the showrunner for MELROSE PLACE back in the day.

I don’t know where Frank got it, how many variations there are of it, or how many names it goes by. It is not itself a unique concept. It is, after all, simply a quick polish of your script.

What makes it worth learning about, however, is what you focus on during this specific pass.

The goal of this polish is simple and limited, which is the beauty of it: your job is to find where the emotion is in the script, or where it should be, and make sure those moments deliver.

Our product is emotion.

It is, in essence, our deal with the audience. They give us a resource, usually time or money, and in return, we evoke emotion from them.

Done well, everyone’s happy, and they ask us to do it again.

Movies are an emotional delivery system, and so our screenplays must be, too. The passion polish is when we make sure we’re delivering what we aimed to.

Think of it as the last trip around the hotel room before you check out to make sure you’re not leaving anything behind.

It’s the focus that matters.

Now, this might all sound obvious, right? “Make sure the emotion is there!” is not world-changing advice.

But something happens when you’re putting it all together. You get focused on plot mechanics, macro-structure questions, subplots, and story logic. Plus, the choices of how you convey all this.

Even with the simplest stories, you are juggling A LOT.

Into a rewrite? Now you’re applying notes. Some are your own, and maybe some are from others. You’re cutting and trimming to get that page count down.

Far too often, the first thing we let go of is some of the extra beats that reveal the reaction to the events. That little extra attention to detail that makes the reader laugh, cry, gasp, or sigh.

But the emotional moments are not luxuries. They are the entire point of the script.

A member of the Writers Lab wrote a grueling scene this week of someone being embarrassed in public. Other people realize this embarrassing thing is happening, then he does, then even more people do.

The pacing was great. The scene was clear. The reactions were visualized. You felt bad for the guy!

It was a well-written scene. Except one small thing. It all built up to a moment that never came.

That one culminating emotional reaction from the protagonist was missing.

Intellectually, we knew it was there. You could easily fill in the blanks and understand the full impact this moment had on him.

But you didn’t FEEL it. You sympathized, but you didn’t empathize.

If this were the movie on the screen, that close-up that maximized the emotion was left on the cutting room floor.

The passion polish is designed to prevent that from happening.

Make it a process.

Early on, the best thing to do is to go through it as steps. Make it a process. Make it mechanical. Be a craftsman.

The more you go through these steps, the more those steps will become habit and muscle memory. You will learn to visualize the moments instantly. You will see what others don’t.

As this process becomes more and more instantaneous, it will look like talent. It isn’t. It’s experience. Because you put in the work.

It’s not a rewrite. It’s a polish.

Big decisions should have already been made. You’re not looking to rewrite the scene here. You’re looking to make sure you’re accomplishing what you wanted to accomplish.

This polish is executed near the endgame of a project. It might be the last thing you do before you deliver an assignment, show it to your agents, or submit it to a contest.

Stay focused.

This is harder than it seems. We will often start worrying about a whole lot of things every time we reread our own work.

And it’s easy to skip over your own words as well. You wrote them, after all. Do you really need to read them again?

Yes, you do.

What we think we wrote and what we actually wrote are often farther apart than we assume.

If you get distracted by enough things bothering you, you may learn that you’re more in need of a rewrite than one final pass of the script.

That’s okay. If that’s the case, go back to a rewrite and start thinking about what is not working in the bigger picture.

If this polish is the right thing at the right time, then the passion polish is all about narrowing your focus on two things.

1. What emotion are you trying to evoke?
2. Is the writing doing it?

Every moment, every beat, every scene has a job.

At this stage, plotting should be in fine shape. What we’re focusing on is whether the emotion is coming off the page and really hitting the reader the way we want it to.

So for every beat and every scene, we’re asking ourselves these questions.

What needs to change?

We take this step so we’re just very clear to ourselves about our intention. We have discussed the importance of the intention often in the Weekly Email, and we will, no doubt, continue to.

But as we read the beats and the scene, it’s important to remind ourselves what they’re trying to accomplish.

What is different at the end of the scene from the beginning? What is true now that wasn’t true then?

This change will either come about by a shift in the emotion, or it will create the shift in the emotion. Sometimes it will be both.

While we need to know what this emotion is, there is another important question:

What do we want the audience to feel?

It’s one of the most important questions we ask, and yet so few screenwriters actually do.

While the emotion of the scene itself is usually the same as how we want the audience to feel, that’s not always the case.

Do we want the reader to laugh? Do we want tension? Do we want the reader to be heartbroken with the protagonist? Embarrassed? Do we want the reader angry?

Once we know what this is:

Is the writing doing that?

Is our writing enough? Is it clear? Is the language reinforcing the emotion, or undermining it?

This is especially vital for the GREAT SCENES. The big emotional beats and those trailer-moment setpieces.

Does the action get our heart pounding? Do we read in anguish as our teenage protagonist is humiliated at the prom?

Does our heart flutter as the romantic leads finally kiss?

These are our money scenes. The scenes that HAVE TO WORK, and it’s not the time to be negotiating page count.

Are we giving the reader enough time to process the brutality they just saw? Or are we skipping past it?

In short, are we giving these moments the same love and attention as the movie itself will when it finally makes it to the screen?

If it does, great! You’re good at this!

Go on to the next moment, the next scene, the next sequence, and ask the same questions again.

But if it doesn’t achieve the emotion you want it to, you then devote your attention to making sure it does.

It usually doesn’t take much.

If you have made the choice of what emotion you want, the foundation is likely already there.

Sometimes it’s simply hitting a return and giving a line its own paragraph for timing and emphasis.

Maybe you choose to use a better verb or adjective.

Often, it’s adding a line that visualizes an emotional reaction, projecting a reaction shot into the reader’s mind that wasn’t there before.

Sometimes, it’s a little more work. Maybe you need to tear an emotional moment apart and rewrite it. The intention is the same, but your wording is different.

But your only focus here is to make each emotional moment sing so the reader feels it.

When you’re satisfied, you go on to the next moment, the next scene, the next sequence, and do it all over again.

Everything is still part of a whole.

You can’t have the emotion up to eleven in every scene, of course. No one wants that. Your job is to make sure each moment does its part.

The key here, as always, is to make choices.

You can’t know if you’re achieving what you want if you didn’t make a choice about what you want.

Non-choices kill. And non-choices kill more projects than actual choices ever will.

The passion polish is designed to clear out the clutter and give ourselves permission to devote our attention solely to these moments.

The next time you think you’re finished with a draft, and you’re about to show it to someone else, remember the passion polish.

It takes time and energy, but making sure a script maximizes the emotional reaction from the reader is worth it.

The Story and Plot Weekly Email is published every Tuesday morning. Don't miss another one.

​ Tom Vaughan
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