One of the most important things editing has taught me about story is this: writing is where I declare meaning. Editing is where I test whether the meaning is actually there.
Start With the Big Noun
I’m a big believer that every film needs a thematic center: some core idea it keeps circling, whether consciously or not. A screenwriting professor of mine used to call this “The Big Noun”: the central concept underneath the plot, characters, and imagery. The deeper you understand that idea, the more clearly you can shape the film around it.
That kind of clarity becomes a real North Star. It guides development, influences what you look for in production, and gives meaning to the choices you make. But it becomes most visible in post, because editing is where you find out whether the material you gathered actually speaks to that larger idea.
A Good Scene Can Still Be the Wrong Scene.
A good example of this came in the post-production process on Rewind Selecta, a pilot for a series currently in development. The project explores the impact of reggae music around the world and how a nation as small as Jamaica has shaped so many genres of music, while so little of that cultural and financial value has made its way back to the island.
The Big Noun guiding that project was inheritance. Or, to expand it: when a sound echoes across the globe, who does that sound belong to?
That question shaped the entire approach. The framing device of the series was built around the idea of a riddim, a backing track reused and reinterpreted by different artists across decades, and how that same musical foundation evolves over time.
Early in development, we developed a scene with an iconic reggae producer creating a brand-new riddim. On its own, it was compelling. It had energy, craft, and authority. But in the edit, it became clear that it wasn’t actually serving the deeper thematic current of the film. It pulled us away from the idea of inheritance and toward something adjacent: creation from scratch.
So we cut it.
In its place, the stronger scene emerged: an artist recording a new track over an old riddim. That moment carried the theme far more clearly. It embodied the central question of the episode. It wasn’t just interesting in isolation — it was in conversation with the larger meaning of the piece. It became a narrative device we could return to throughout the pilot.
That’s the kind of lesson editing teaches you over and over again: a good scene is not automatically a necessary one.
Story doesn’t live inside individual moments alone. It lives in what those moments say collectively. A scene can be beautifully shot, emotionally resonant, even memorable on its own, and still be wrong for the film. It can repeat what the story already knows. It can pull attention away from what matters most. It can even contradict the deeper thing the work is trying to say.
Where Intention Meets Reality
That’s why I love documentary so much. You’re not creating in a vacuum. In writing, you can construct a perfect thematic object. You can make every character, line of dialogue, and plot turn point towards the same central meaning. Documentary doesn’t give you that luxury. You’re working with real people, real circumstances, real limitations. Someone doesn’t say the perfect thing. A location falls through. A moment happens too fast. Even your camera placement can become reactive to the world in front of you.
And that’s exactly what makes the edit so revealing.
The edit is where intention meets reality. It’s where you find out whether the meaning you thought you were pursuing is actually present in the material, or whether you were only projecting it onto the idea of the film.
You still need intention, of course. Another professor once told me, “If you don’t make a decision on screen, the audience will make that decision for you.” I think that’s true. Even in documentary, where so much is discovered in the moment, you still need to know why a scene is here, why this beat matters, why this cut belongs.
Because the rhythm is not separate from the story. Rhythm is one of the ways the story is felt.
Theme is built not just through content, but through emphasis, duration, juxtaposition, and omission. It comes alive in the relationship between moments. Meaning doesn’t live only in what you intended when you wrote or planned the film. It lives in what remains, what connects, and what accumulates over time.
If you’ve worked around me long enough, you’ve probably heard me say, “kill your children.” It’s my more aggressive variation of “kill your darlings.” What I mean is simple: the work we make can feel so personal, so close to us, that we start protecting individual moments because of the effort or love that went into them. But if something compromises the voice of the larger piece, it has to go.
That’s what editing has taught me that writing alone never could.
Writing gave me the impulse to tell stories. Editing taught me how stories actually live: in rhythm, omission, juxtaposition, and emotional accumulation. It taught me that meaning is not just written into scenes.
It is shaped in the space between them.
-Adam
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