Screenwriting 101: Ron Bass

“If you read my novels, you’d see a lot of sentence fragments. And there are some punchy phrases that are meant to light the mind. I’ve always felt that writing was communication — not showing off how articulate you are, or showing off your vocabulary. It’s about making your reader see in his or her mind exactly what you see in your mind. And when I say ‘see,’ I don’t mean just intellectually. I mean emotionally and viscerally as well as with the mind — ‘see’ with feelings. It’s an attempt to communicate. It doesn’t have to be grammatical. Just the fact of breaking grammatical form helps communication because it forces the person who’s reading it to look at it differently. It does jar you and it does jolt you and it does stick out and you don’t get to put yourself to sleep with the rhythm and flow of normal prose.”

— Ron Bass