Rob’s Finds

Rob Fuller shows off his pedagogical (go ahead and look it up) side with lots of insight from screenwriters about screenwriting. First a quick snippet from Shane Black about writing action movies:

Then Charlie Jane Anders at io9 provides a provocative post: In Praise of Seat of the Pants Storytelling:

People act like the worst accusation you can hurl at storytellers is “They made it up as they went along.” As if having a Master Plan is the same as good storytelling. In fact, it’s frequently the other way around.

Often the best storytelling is improvisational, like jazz or chess. Whether you’re talking about books, television, movies or comics, the cleverest and most fascinating stories often come out of a writer’s desperation in the face of a roadblock. Obviously, when it comes to television, or a series of movies, these roadblocks may come from outside — an actor can die, get pregnant or quit, or a studio executive may demand more shiny robots — but these roadblocks exist in every medium.

And some advice from a GITS screenwriting fave:

As Joss Whedon told Laura Miller in a 2003 Salon.com interview about the final season of Buffy The Vampire Slayer:

The master plan does not have a master plan. Television ultimately finds itself, and after it finds itself, it finds itself changing. I’d have a year plotted out, maybe two years in advance. And I had the major points that I knew I needed to hit and they would serve as anchors and we’d get from one to the next, and that was great. But the rest you deliberately don’t have a master plan for, because you don’t know what’s going to happen. Apparently people seem to be responding to this Boreanaz fellow [David, the actor who plays Angel]. Apparently Seth [Green, who plays Oz] is gone. Apparently this villain isn’t working out and this one’s popping like crazy. You need to improvise, you always need to.

And finally screenwriter-director Tony Gilroy weighs in on storytelling:

Thanks, Rob. Now class dismissed!