An exercise used in screenwriting classes is to split the class into A and B groups and pair each A student with a B student.  The A student then has five minutes to pitch his story to the B student, the B student then has five minutes to critique the story.  Then it’s the B student's turn to pitch and be critiqued.  After the full 20 minutes, A students rotate to a different B student and the cycle continues.  The goal really isn’t to hone your skills as a person with a perfect pitch, but to help the writer gain some sort of clarity in telling their story in a short amount of time.

I've had to do this in every screenwriting class I’ve ever taken at UCLA.  Last night I had to do it once again.

I've been working on one screenplay for about a year now.  After all the log lines, beat sheets, outlines and pages of actual script, I think the one thing I’ve taken away from the experience so far is to keep it simple.  If you can’t tell the major plot points of your story in five minutes, then it’s probably too complex for an audience to follow.  If you have to stop to explain the physics of a plot device, it’s probably a point that will lose a good chunk of the audience.  If you have to use the word “meanwhile” to describe an important piece of action happening simultaneously somewhere the main character isn’t, then you’ve probably gone off track somewhere.

My next story is going to be so much more simple.