What are YOUR screenwriting Do’s and Don’ts?

I occasionally dip into the GITS archive of over 20,000 blog posts to see what items of interest I can resurrect for the benefit of GITS readers which is how I found this April 2009 Business of Screenwriting post: Do’s and Don’ts #1. Some highlights:

Do: Regularly generate story concepts

I was going to write “Generate a story concept a day,” but I thought that might come off as too daunting. However, you should spend a portion of every working day with story concepts. There are three elements to this process:

* Research: Everything from reading obituaries to odd news items, you never know where a great story concept will come from.

* Brainstorm: Take pre-existing movie concepts and genre or gender bend them. Put a job and a location together (“A cop in kindergarten”). And when in doubt, ask yourself, “What if…”, as in “What if the President of the United States had a sudden debilitating medical condition and the Powers That Be substitute a look-alike as the acting President” (the premise to the movie Dave).

* Test: Find a few close associates or friends, people who know something about how Hwood operates, and pitch them your story concepts. If they respond well, put that concept on your Keeper list. If they shrug or say they hate it, put that concept on your Backup list.

Don’t: Tell your story concepts to anybody you don’t trust 100%.

This is especially true in Hwood. Your agent and manager are safe. But unless you’ve got the idea worked up into a formal pitch… or your reps have set up a meeting with you where everyone knows going in that you’ll be throwing out ideas — which means the producers are on notice that your reps know what’s going on — don’t pitch story concepts.

Story concepts are the lifeblood of Hwood. Movies have been greenlit based on the story concept itself. However story concepts are hard to protect. Your best protection is to flesh out your story concept into a completed spec script. The next level of protection is to work up a pitch. The next level of protection is to keep your mouth shut!

You can read the rest of the post here.

Note the title of the post: Do’s and Don’ts #1. Clearly I intended to do more than one, probably an entire series of posts, but evidently I never got around to that.

So let’s see if we can crowd-source advice from GITS readers: What are your screenwriting Do’s and Don’ts? What have you discovered along the way, things to do, things not to do?

I encourage folks to head to comments and offer their observations. Maybe we come up with a post with a lot of helpful tips which can benefit other writers.

Screenwriting do’s and don’ts. What are yours?

Comment Archive