In issue 213 of TV Zone magazine there's a long article about the new Shaun the Sheep animated series from Aardman. What I found interesting was one story related by series director Richard Goleszowski and producer Julie Lockhart, about an episode in which Shaun's friend, Bitzer the dog, has a bad tooth:
"This shows the difference between writing the script where you think it's funny and then shooting the storyboard," Lockhart points out. "It actually looked like torture, because Bitzer didn't want to have his teeth pulled! Because you couldn't put nice words in, it actually looked like they were submitting him to real torture!"
Goleszowski adds, "In the storyboard he was being dragged behind the jeep on a piece of rope tied round his tooth, and it all seemed very funny, but when you saw it, it just looked so cruel and hideous we had to start again."
This points up a common problem for writers: how we intend something and how it looks (on the screen or in the mind of a reader) may not be the same thing. One way to get over this is to use the dissociation technique. When you are writing the scene, you probably are living it along with your characters--you are associated. For one of your rewrite-readings of your material, imagine it playing out on a movie screen, and yourself as a person in the audience (this works for novels, too). This is the dissociated state, and the effect of the scene may suddenly be quite different.