A Vision Isn't a Vision Until Someone Else Can See It

One of the strangest things about conducting is that you never actually make a sound.

You can hear the performance you want in your head with absolute clarity. But unless 90 other people understand what you’re hearing, it exists only in your head.

Screenwriting turns out to be much the same.

A great advantage of being a writer is imagination. We see the scene, not just the words.

The room.

The light.

The hesitation before a character answers.

The look across the table.

The thing someone almost says, but doesn’t.

That’s the gift. It’s also the problem.

Because when we go back to edit our own work, all of that is still there in our heads.

We know what we meant. The reader doesn’t.

We read a line of dialogue and hear the subtext we intended.

The reader may just hear the line.

We read an action and see the emotional beat surrounding it.

The reader only sees the action we actually put on the page.

We know why a character suddenly changes course.

The reader doesn’t. They only met them 23 pages ago.

That makes writers uniquely bad at spotting certain problems in their own work - - not because we lack objectivity in some abstract sense, but because we are supplying missing information without realizing it.

The imagination that allows us to create the scene also disguises the flaws when we reread it.

Which may be why one of the hardest questions in revision is also one of the simplest:

Is this actually on the page, or is it only in my head?

For me, that question has become one of the most useful editing tools I have.

Because the reader can’t see what I meant. They can only see what I wrote.

Ethan Danov

Conductor | Screenwriter

Creator, Firebirds