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Excerpt from “Your Screenplay Sucks!: 100 Ways to Make it Great”
(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
Loading ...by William M. Akers I’ve been doing exactly what you do, writing, for a long, long time. I’ve taught and critiqued screenwriters for almost that long, and, lo and behold, I discovered that all beginning writers make the same mistakes. So I wrote a book, a checklist of stuff to do to your script before you [...]
Situation Based Writing
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...The most important bit of writing advice for the beginning writer, every scene you write needs to be a situation, no exceptions. You must create interest before you can accomplish anything else, and situations create interest. The two basic ways situations emerge: circumstance and strong character need. …Talking about drama is not the same as drama… …The [...]
Fudging the Page Count
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Formatting tricks of the trade, to manipulate the all important page count. For the obsessive-compulsive screenwriter. Or is that redundant? …Any script with a page length over 125 is suspect. Over 130, and the script is, at best, an interim draft with “Lots more work to be done.” …Any slight advantage is worth gaining. Nothing that might [...]
Screenwriting: Lean and Mean
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Using Reverse Cause and Effect to Construct a Tight Script by Jeff Kitchen The work of the amateur screenwriter is often characterized by the Unnecessary. Dialogue and description are often overdone, scenes tend to be overwritten, acts are bloated, and so on. You may have entire scenes that are unnecessary, perhaps even a whole act that isn’t [...]
Finding Inspiration in the Cookie Aisle
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...by Christina Hamlett The arrival of Daylight Savings Time three weeks early this year heralds the approach of a long stretch of summer for you to finally get cracking on that screenplay you’ve always wanted to write. There’s only one obstacle: Where to find a fresh story to whet the appetite of prospective producers and appease [...]
Minor Characters Don’t Need Major Introductions
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...by Christina Hamlett EXT. – DUSK – CHICAGO STREET In a traveling shot, we see JOSEPH TAMBERLIN, a homeless man of 47, asleep between two garbage cans in a trash-littered and stinky alley. He has long, dirty blond hair streaked with grey and pulled back in a ponytail secured with a child’s discarded scrunchy. His eyes are [...]
How to Write Badly to Write Better
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...by Gene Perret In a previous column, I noted that the magic bullet for writing success is to Be Good At What You Do. If you want to be a writer, learn to write. That earlier article practically guaranteed that if you became a good writer and continued to become a better writer that the profession [...]
The purpose of drama, and its relationship to Cameron Diaz’s ass
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...John August (co-writer of Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle) asks his readers to comment on this quote by David Mamet: “People have tried for centuries to use drama to change people’s lives, to influence, to comment, to express themselves. It doesn’t work. It might be nice if it worked for those things, but it doesn’t. The only [...]
Giving The Audience A Great Ride
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...How to Create Passion, Suspense, and Other Entertainment Dimensions by James Bonnet The entertainment dimensions are the pleasant sensations the audience feels when they experience your story. The most important of these feelings are those associated with the actions of the genre structures. When you isolate the plots and subplots of your story, you isolate actions that [...]
How to write a movie
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Read it aloud, make sure there’s a favorite part - and don’t fall into the ‘German funk trap’. Frank Cottrell Boyce who scripted 24 Hour Party People and A Cock and Bull Story, lays down his screenwriting golden rules …A while back, I was on Radio 4’s Film Programme the same day as Simon Pegg. We [...]
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