Kill “Sorry” and “Besides”

A tip for playwrights and screenwriters:Eliminate “sorry” and “besides” from your vocabularies. Too often I’m watching something — even a prestige production by a writer I respect — Character X will be savaging Character Y and then when the monologue is complete will add “sorry” or “besides” completely robbing the emotional power of what came before and destroying the stakes of the scene. If you are going to go to an emotionally dangerous place that might alter the relationship of your characters, you have to own it. Don’t shy away from it. Good writing is about letting your characters grow in unpredictable ways and not remain static. So, banish these two escape hatches from your work.