Posted on December 28, 2010 in Story | No Comments
In order to create a story that expresses the arc of transformation, a need for that transformation must be established. It is within this context that I can best define the fatal flaw of character.
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Posted on October 13, 2010 in Selling Your Script, Story | 3 Comments
Lack of real, empathetic characters is the leading reason why agents and production executives pass on scripts. In today’s competitive market, it is imperative to create the kind of full-bodied characters that mesmerize gatekeepers and bump your script up to the next level.
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Posted on October 11, 2010 in Story | 2 Comments
Emotions are the lifeblood of characters and of stories. Without emotional characters, you are just writing events, but you’re not drawing your audience into your story. To be a successful writer, you want to create emotional characters so your audience will become emotionally involved with them.
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Posted on October 6, 2010 in Story | 3 Comments
Have you ever wondered why characters like Sherlock Holmes, King Arthur, Achilles, Scrooge, Dorothy and Superman go on forever? The real secret of their immortality lies in something you’ve probably never equated with the creation of a great character or a great story — the quintessential.
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Posted on September 22, 2010 in Story | 1 Comment
Every story spans a period of time. Story can be defined as conflict shown in scene, meaning that most writers will treat time in scene rather than in summary.
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Posted on September 15, 2010 in Story | 3 Comments
F.X. Snyder from Garden Grove, asks: My villain is a bit too one-dimensional. Any tips for fleshing out a character who’s not the protagonist?
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Posted on August 11, 2010 in Story | 1 Comment
For the last 30 years, screenwriting has been dominated by a mechanical approach to creating story. For example, the so-called “three-act structure” is really a mechanical imprint from the outside that is laid over the top of a story. Act breaks are completely arbitrary. They don’t actually exist in the story.
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Posted on April 14, 2010 in General Screenwriting, Story | 1 Comment
by Kim Hudson
The title The Virgin’s Promise has two meanings and in a nutshell, it describes the journey of the Virgin. The first meaning is the community’s belief that the Virgin has agreed to live up to their expectations. She has made a promise to them. The second speaks to the Virgin’s unproven potential [...]
Posted on January 17, 2010 in Legal & Copyright | 2 Comments
Mark Galsor and Jesse Saivar tackle the question of what’s legal when dealing with fictional characters from other movies.
…Q: My company is producing a film which has a character that is taken from another very well known film. This new story has absolutely nothing to do with the previously established film, is not [...]
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Posted on December 22, 2009 in General Screenwriting, Story | 2 Comments
by Syd Field
Henry James, the great American novelist, in an essay entitled The Art of Fiction, asks a rhetorical question about the nature of character: “What is character,” he writes, “but the determination of incident. And what is incident but the illumination of character.” The key word of course, is “incident;” what the dictionary defines [...]
Posted on July 30, 2009 in Story | No Comments
by Linda Cowgill
Synopsis:
It’s a lesson worth learning early: there’s more to successful drama than just a string of vaguely related sequences.
Stories are how we understand the world. An encounter with a surly bus driver that we relay to a friend at lunch, a fairy tale we read to a child in bed, Tolstoy’s epic historical [...]
Posted on July 28, 2009 in General Screenwriting | No Comments
Acclaimed writer-director Paul Haggis has been a fixture of television and film for over 25 years. In this wide-ranging interview, the Oscar-winning co-screenwriter, director, and producer of Crash (Best Picture 2005) discusses a three-decade career that led from writing for sitcoms like Diff’rent Strokes and The Facts of Life to his breakthrough screenplay for Oscar-winning [...]
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Posted on July 15, 2009 in Story | No Comments
“How to make your readers love your character.”
In the first few seconds of the Clint Eastwood flick “Hang ‘Em High,” we see a beautiful example of a dramatic tool Blake Snyder calls a “Save the Cat” scene. This connects the viewer emotionally to the main character, and makes us care about and enjoy the story.
This [...]
Posted on October 22, 2008 in General Screenwriting | 2 Comments
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 [...]
Posted on August 4, 2008 in General Screenwriting | No Comments
by Pamela Jaye Smith
What is it that lures people over to the Dark Side?
Your audience wants to find out how people and things go bad, so in your story, be sure to reveal some of how the characters become the way they are — not to excuse their behavior but to get us engaged with [...]
