Writing and the Creative Life: Perspiration and Inspiration Sometimes it’s all about the work. Sometimes it’s all about the un-work.
Go Into The Story Resource: Screenwriting Advice From The Past A series analyzing screenwriting advice from the book “How to Write Photoplays” written in 1920 by Anita Loos and her husband John Emerson.
Great Scene: “Arrival” How the 2016 science fiction movie uses a bookend to reveal a remarkable truth… and upend our understanding of time.
The Business of Screenwriting: Your first big check It is March, 1987. I am here, the Hamburger Hamlet on Sunset Blvd. It’s 1PM. I am meeting one of my agents for lunch. For dessert: My first…
Go Into The Story Resource: Great Scenes When you boil it down, screenwriting is scene-writing. Hone your scene-writing ability by studying these scenes.
Reader Question: How insane is it for a forty-six year-old to try to start a Hollywood writing… It’s crazy, but then it’s crazy for ANYONE to expect to break into Hollywood.
The Coen Brothers, Storytelling, and Fate A poem by Ethan Coen reveals a key clue to the brothers’ story sensibilities.
How They Write a Script: Richard Brooks Another in the Go Into The Story series “How They Write a Script,” excerpts from interview with notable Hollywood screenwriters. Today we…
Go Into The Story Resource: Screenwriting 101 Hundreds of observations about the craft of screenwriting from professional writers.
How They Write A Script: Paul Schrader In a previous post, I noted two radically different approaches to writing as represented by Neil Simon, who doesn’t “make outlines at all”…
Screenwriting 101: Ben Hecht “Two generations of Americans have been informed nightly that a woman who betrayed her husband (or a husband a wife) could never find…
Go Into The Story Resource: An Argument Against Screenplay Formulas “We end up with a ceaseless cesspool of formulaic crap carving its way into and ultimately out of Hollywood movie and TV development…
How to Use Dashes and Ellipses in a Screenplay Examples from movie scripts demonstrate these two tiny forms of punctuation can be a valuable asset for a screenwriter.
Spec Script Deal: “Shots! Shots! Shots!” Universal Pictures acquires action comedy spec script “Shots! Shots! Shots!” written by Matt Mider and Kevin Burrows. Jason Momoa is…
On Writing “Writing is like everything else: the more you do it the better you get. Don’t try to perfect as you go along, just get to the end of the…
Go Into The Story Resource: Black List Writers on the Craft Some of Hollywood’s top screenwriters share insights from my interviews.
Is My Screenplay Big Enough to Be a Movie? This is a fundamental question screenwriters must ask themselves at all stages of a screenplay’s development and writing. Why? Because it’s…
Great Scene: “Wonder Woman” Diana single-handedly takes on the German Army in the breathtaking No Man’s Land scene from the movie Wonder Woman.
