I have a bad habit. When I finish writing something — anything — I immediately want to fix it. Edit it. Polish it. Make it better. I finish the last sentence, and my cursor is already jumping back to the top, hunting for weak phrases and clumsy transitions.
In my consulting work, this makes sense. Strategy documents have deadlines. Client deliverables need to go out on time. You write, you edit, you send. The whole cycle might happen in a single afternoon. Speed is a feature, not a bug.
In scripting a performance, this habit nearly ruined several pieces before they had a chance to become anything.
The problem is not that immediate editing is bad. It is that immediate editing is limited. You can catch typos. You can fix grammar. You can smooth a transition that clearly does not work. But you cannot see the script as an audience would, because the script is still too alive in your head. Every word is still vibrating with the intention you poured into it five minutes ago. You are too close. You are too invested. You are reading what you meant, not what you wrote.
The Marination Principle
Ken Weber has a phrase in Maximum Entertainment that I have thought about more than almost anything else in the book. He writes about letting the script marinate — leaving it for a few days, then returning with fresh eyes. “Time allows your thoughts to marinate,” he writes. “Your subconscious dices and chops and invents variations.”
The first time I read that, I dismissed it as obvious advice. Everyone knows you should let work sit before editing. It is Writing 101. I had heard it in college. I had ignored it then, too.
But there is a difference between hearing advice and experiencing the truth of it. And the experience that changed my relationship with this principle happened in the space between two hotel rooms.
The Script That Changed Overnight
I was preparing a new mentalism piece for a corporate event in Linz. Medium-sized company, year-end celebration, about eighty people. I had been developing the piece for a few weeks — working out the structure, testing the effect in informal settings, building the beats. The time had come to write the actual script.
I sat down in my hotel room on a Monday night and wrote the whole thing in about two hours. It was maybe four minutes of performance material, which does not sound like much until you realize that four minutes of spoken material, with pauses and actions notated, fills several pages.
When I finished, I felt good about it. Really good. The opening had a hook. The volunteer interaction had personality. The build toward the climax had tension. The reveal had a clean, punchy line. I read through it twice, made a few small adjustments, and went to bed satisfied.
The plan was to rehearse it the next day. But the next day was packed with client meetings, and by the time I got back to my room, I was too tired to stand up and perform anything. So the script sat in my bag, untouched.
Wednesday was a travel day — trains and taxis and another hotel in another city. The script stayed in my bag.
Thursday morning, I woke up early, pulled out the script, and started reading it.
I barely recognized my own work.
Not in a good way.
The opening hook that I had felt so clever about was, I now realized, too clever. It was a consultant’s opening — analytical, structured, designed to impress rather than to connect. It would work in a boardroom. It would die on a stage.
The volunteer interaction I had been proud of was overwritten. I had scripted six lines where two would do the job. The extra lines were not adding warmth or personality or humor. They were adding duration. Dead time disguised as dialogue.
The build toward the climax was too linear. It went from A to B to C to D without any variation in energy or pace. Reading it fresh, I could feel the audience getting ahead of me, sensing where this was going, losing the surprise.
And the punchy closing line was not punchy at all. It was a punchline looking for a setup that I had not properly built. It needed three beats of preparation that were not in the script.
All of this was invisible on Monday night. All of it was obvious on Thursday morning.
What Happens in the Gap
When you finish writing something, the words exist in your working memory at full resolution. You remember every choice you made. You remember the intention behind every sentence. This rich contextual information acts like a filter — it colors your reading, filling in meaning and nuance that is not actually on the page.
When you step away for a few days, that contextual information degrades. The word-level choices lose their glow. You start reading the words for what they actually say rather than what you intended them to say.
Your subconscious also works on the material while you are not looking. I have lost count of the number of times I have stepped away from a script on Monday, done completely unrelated work on Tuesday and Wednesday, and then woken up Thursday with a better opening line fully formed in my head, as if someone else had written it while I slept.
Conscious focus is excellent for generating material. It is less excellent for evaluating material. The critical distance required for honest evaluation needs time to develop, and the best way to create that distance is simply to walk away.
The Consulting Parallel
Here is what surprised me: I already knew this in my professional life. I just had not connected it to performance.
In consulting, I have a rule. Any important document gets written at least three days before the deadline. Not because it takes three days to write. Because it takes three days to forget what I meant and start seeing what I said. Three days later, I always find gaps, unjustified assumptions, and passages that inform without persuading.
I had been applying this discipline to my consulting work for fifteen years and had completely failed to apply it to my scripting. Because I treated scripting as something less formal, something I could knock out the night before and refine on the fly.
But a performance script is more demanding than a strategy document. A strategy document gets read at the reader’s pace. A performance script gets delivered at the performer’s pace. The audience cannot reread a sentence they did not understand. They are trapped in the linear flow of your words, and if those words are not right, there is no second chance.
The Three-Day Rule
I now have a personal rule: no editing on the same day I write. Ideally, three days between writing and first revision. At minimum, one full night of sleep.
This is not always practical. Sometimes I write it, sleep, and revise in the morning. One night is better than no nights.
But when I have three days, the transformation is real. The script I return to on day four is a different document from the one I left on day one. Not because the words have changed. Because I have changed. I am no longer the writer defending my choices. I am a reader encountering the material, and that shift reveals everything the writer’s ego was hiding.
What to Look for When You Come Back
Over time, I have developed a checklist for the return visit. These are the things I find myself catching most often after a three-day break.
Overwriting. This is my biggest weakness. I write too much. Too many words in a sentence. Too many sentences in a section. Too many sections in a script. The three-day break makes the excess visible because I am no longer in love with the words. I can see them for what they are: baggage. Weight the performance does not need.
False cleverness. Lines that are technically clever but do not serve the audience. Wordplay that amuses the writer but confuses the listener. Structural tricks that draw attention to the script rather than to the experience. These are the darlings that need killing, and you cannot kill them when they are still your darlings. You need distance before they stop being clever and start being indulgent.
Missing bridges. Transitions that work in your head but not on the page. Jumps from one idea to the next that feel smooth when you are inside the creative flow but feel abrupt when you are outside it. The three-day break reveals every gap, every missing step, every moment where the audience would need a handhold and you forgot to provide one.
Wrong energy. Sections pitched at the wrong level of intensity for where they fall in the performance. Energy mapping is almost impossible when the script is fresh because you are projecting your own energy onto it. With distance, the energy the words actually carry becomes clear.
Missed opportunities. Places where you could have said something better, funnier, more vivid. These are invisible when you are writing because you are focused on getting from point A to point B. With distance, the scenic route becomes visible.
The Subconscious Workshop
The most remarkable part of this process is what happens without your conscious involvement. I have started keeping a notepad by my bed — old school, pen and paper — because the best script revisions often arrive in the morning, in that half-awake state where conscious thought has not yet fully taken control.
A better opening line. A sharper transition. A funnier aside. A more natural way to phrase something that had been bothering me, even though I did not know it was bothering me until the solution arrived.
This is what Weber means by the subconscious dicing and chopping and inventing variations. Your brain continues to process creative problems after you have stopped consciously working on them. But it only does this work if you give it space. If you keep fiddling with the script, keep editing, keep polishing, you are crowding out the subconscious process with conscious activity.
Step away. Let it sit. Trust that the quiet part of your brain is doing work you cannot do with effort alone.
The Hardest Part
The hardest part of this practice is not the waiting. It is the ego management. Because when you come back to a script after three days and find problems everywhere, the natural response is discouragement. “I thought this was good. I was proud of this. And now I can see it is full of holes.”
I felt this acutely the first few times. The gap between how good the script felt on day one and how rough it looked on day four was demoralizing. It made me question my ability to judge my own work. If I was this wrong about this script, what else was I wrong about?
But here is what I eventually realized: the fact that you can see the problems on day four means you are growing. It means your critical judgment is sharper than your initial execution. It means your taste exceeds your current skill — which is exactly the condition required for improvement.
The scripts that survive the three-day test are better than anything I would produce in a single sitting. They are tighter, cleaner, more natural, more human. They sound like me because they have been stripped of the consultant-speak and the false cleverness and the overwriting that my first-draft self cannot seem to avoid.
Leave the script alone. Walk away. Do something else. Trust the process.
The version you come back to will be waiting for you. And it will be ready to become something better.