10 tips from Billy Wilder

From the fantastic book “Conversations with Wilder” in which writer-director Cameron Crowe interviews Billy Wilder, come these 10 screenwriting tips:

1. Grab ’em by the throat and never let go.

2. Develop a clean line of action for your leading character.

3. The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.

4. If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.

5. Tip from Ernst Lubitsch: Let the audience add up two plus two. They’ll love you forever.

6. The audience is fickle. Know where you’re going.

7. In doing voice-overs, be careful not to describe what the audience already sees. Add to what they are seeing.

8. The event that occurs at the second act curtain triggers the end of the movie.

9. The 3rd act must build, build, build in tempo until the last event, and then…

10. …that’s it. Don’t hang around.

Great stuff. And notice how many of the tips have to do with plotting and structure; apart from #2, nothing about character. Echoes that William Goldman quote, “Screenplays are structure.”