Wherever your main plot points happen in your screenplay, there’s a good chance you can move them up earlier. Especially if it’s an early draft you’re working on. We tend to delay our big plot points in early drafts.
— scriptshadow.net
The reason this works is that early drafts are shaped by how long it took you, the writer, to figure out your story — not by what the audience actually needs to feel momentum. You know the ending already, so you're patient with setup in a way readers never will be. Say your inciting incident happens on page twenty because that's when you finally understood your character well enough to disrupt her life. Move it to page seven. You'll invent a leaner version of that same disruption, and everything before it gets sharper by necessity.
The caution: don't gut every quiet passage in the name of speed. Some scenes need to breathe so the plot point actually lands with weight instead of just arriving. Compression should serve clarity, not just velocity.
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