After many rounds of notes on the same script, one of my consulting clients once remarked that perfecting a script is really like a Rubik’s cube.

He wasn’t wrong.

When you change something it affects everything else, so it’s not so easy to just try to fix one element and create no repercussions elsewhere.

And there are so many things we’re trying to get right all at the same time. To use the concept from my book The Idea, I see seven elements to a strong script — even a strong concept for a script — and you can’t just focus in on some and ignore the others.

And unfortunately that’s often what happens. When you decide to try to make a script or concept really Entertaining, for instance (which is the “E” in my “PROBLEM” acronym), you’re almost always going to potentially sacrifice Believability (the “B” in “PROBLEM”). Maybe the easiest example of this is in comedy. How many times does a script go for something funny but it just feels “over the top” and not believable, so it loses the audience (and doesn’t get the laugh)? As a comedy lover, I see this a lot. And the same thing happens if you’re trying to entertain through action or thrills or some other genre.

But the opposite is also true. Prioritize Believability too much and you might write something that just isn’t Entertaining enough to provide escapist fun for millions of people looking to relax and enjoy a movie or show in a particular genre. (And not having a strong sense of genre, as I teach in my course, is usually a mistake that means the writer hasn’t decided how they plan to Entertain.)

Another common issue is when a writer prioritizes Theme, or what they want to say in a script, above all else. I call this being Meaningful (the “M” in “PROBLEM”), and when you make this the first priority, you typically have a hard time fulfilling some or all of the other six elements that make for a compelling story.

I might even go as far as to say that the first six PROBLEM elements are the six sides of your Rubik’s Cube and the 7th (“Meaningful”) is kind of like a larger view of the cube as a whole, and what the point of the whole thing was.

This is why there can be several passes on a script, as one tends to aspects that aren’t quite working yet. Punch-ups to make a script more entertaining are very common in the professional world. So are character passes that seek to make the people more Relatable (the “R” in “PROBLEM”) and/or Believable. And thus easier to buy into and root for.

Sometimes a script has to be tweaked to make its concept or approach to its topic more Original (the “O” in “PROBLEM”) if it seems too similar to something else. But going too hard after Originality can also cause Believability problems.

So you’re always working one side of “the cube” while trying not to screw up the others.

The “P” and “L” in PROBLEM — “Punishing” and “Life-Altering” — are probably the two that I’m looking at first, in any concept. You want both the difficulty and stakes to be big enough, and it’s hard to fix that at the script level, because those are so baked into the idea. But with those, too, you have to make sure that you don’t take it to a place that isn’t that Believable, in terms of why it’s so difficult and the stakes are so high. And when you really punish a character, you have to be careful that they are also active in response to what’s happening, or they will seem to lack “agency,” and the audience could start to check out.

And of course that’s what this is really all about. You want an audience of strangers to be emotionally invested and engaged from start to finish. If they don’t relate strongly to at least one character who faces a punishing challenge with high stakes and an original and entertaining situation and plan to try to solve it, that’s always believable, and in the end is meaningful in some way, it’s hard to grab and keep that audience.

But if you can somehow do each of these things at the same time, then you’re in business…