Oh, Maddy! Poor girl lost her B Story to somebody else because it didn’t fit with her background (she’s the smart, studious, going-to-be-Valedictorian one). I was skimming over her in a lot of scenes because she had some quirks, and those worked to get story moving without too much really shitty exposition, but she didn’t do much else because she no longer had A Problem. Everyone needs a goal, a problem, something. Everybody arcs.
Something like 200 pages into the script… I got it. Maddy’s problem! And it fits, and it feeds off someone else’s problems, and it’s something that’s important to me, personally. You have no idea how many scenes I wrote and then deleted because Maddy was just not right. I have the same problem with Kieran. Every single time I try to use Kieran for exposition it goes to shit. Realizing that and just cutting every time he does it has made the story so much better and tighter. Show, don’t tell.
