April 2, 2012
Pilar Alessandra recently spelled out ten tips for writing strong female lead characters. Here are her tips:
1. Turn The Tables on Female Stereotypes
Don’t ignore negative perceptions about women; challenge them by turning negative labels into positive traits for your character. “Gossipy” becomes well informed. “Catty” becomes competitive. And don’t forget that positive stereotypes are still stereotypes. Humanize the perfect model of a woman by showing the darker side.
2. Heighten Your Female Character’s Goals
The unappreciated temp doesn’t want to be noticed; she wants to be boss. The neglected wife doesn’t want to find out about her husband’s infidelity, she wants to get even. Scripts that think big sell!
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March 6, 2012
John Buchanan of Script Magazine recently laid out the work habits that writers need to have to be successful in the film industry:
Screenwriting is unlike any other professional endeavor. To survive its unique pressures and peculiarities and have a career, you’ll have to master a few fundamental disciplines.
It’s one thing to sell a spec script or complete a first paid assignment for a studio. It’s another thing entirely to establish a reputation as a reliable professional and enjoy a long career as an in-demand Hollywood screenwriter. After the glow of initial success fades out, new writers learn—often painfully—that the requisite capabilities for a working scribe reach far beyond the ability to write crackling dialogue or craft a nifty plot twist. Too often, it’s assumed that talent trumps disciplined, hard work.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
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February 24, 2012
Paul Chitlik of Script Magazine recently fielded the question, “How can a screenwriter write descriptions we can “see” without overwriting them?” Paul offered some poignant advice:
Here’s one of the basic contradictions a writer has to face. You know that a reader, probably not the producer, is going to be the first person at the production company or studio to read your script, so you have to impress this person. We know that motion pictures are all about what you see on screen, so you’d think that the descriptive passages of a script would be important. And they are. But readers often skip through them to get to the dialogue because they think, sometimes correctly, that the character is shaped by the dialogue. And dialogue is easier to read. But harder to write.
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January 17, 2012
John Buchanan of Script Magazine has written an article about opportunities often overlooked by novice screenwriters: writing assignments. Buchanan quotes Jeff Morris saying, ““The total amount of money paid out for assignment work versus specs is much bigger… That’s where the work is. It dwarfs spec sales by about 1,000 to one, probably.”
Buchanan writes:
When most aspiring screenwriters imagine their successful against-all-odds assault on Hollywood, they think in terms of a big spec sale that changes their lives overnight. But there is also a less glamorous, more realistic way to break into the industry—and that’s a first writing assignment that sets them on a path to becoming a genuine working writer.
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October 21, 2011
This article from The Script Lab takes a look at the battle that every writer fights to not just create an unforgettable story but unforgettable characters as well AND to make the two fit together flawlessly. When push comes to shove, which will make a better movie?
There are 12 index cards on the black pegboard in front of me.
Card #1: An explosive opening. There is no way I can write an opening more perfect.
Card #2: The introduction of my Hero- in one scene, I’ve made him likable, relatable, and simply an overall badass.
Card #40: A climax of fantastic proportions. Brave. Jaw-dropping. Exactly the climax I want to tell.
Card #50: A dynamite ending. Emotional. Inspirational. Faulkner would be jealous.
Card #12: Empty. Empty. Empty. Empty. Empty.
Here I am, in the middle of the story, and all around me I have index cards that all tell some semblance of a what I want to write, but no idea how to piece it together. A story that I want to tell, and a character that I absolutely love… and the two just don’t go together.
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September 27, 2011
I have two tricks. One is that I write every day, regardless of whether I want to or not because as I just said, in a way I never want to write. It’s not even an issue. I just write four pages a day when I’m working. I have a quota. A sub-set of that system is that I am a firm believer that bad ideas lead to good ones. When I am not inspired and I don’t know the solution I will just type out the most banal solution and know that at least it’s on the page and it gets me to the next story beat.
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September 22, 2011
This article from MovieBytes.com gives some simple, practical advice for how not to give away your inexperience in the first few pages of your writing, the pages that every reader is going to judge you on and possibly not read past. Take a look:
Five pages. That’s what you get. You spend six months on that spec screenplay and the reader at the agency-manager-prodco-contest is giving five lousy pages before he makes a judgement.
It’s an outrage! Blame it on Attention-Deficit-Disorder, the Twitterverse, the 24/7 news cycle…but guess what?
A good reader can recognize a poorly written script within five pages or less. Sometimes it can be seen on Page 1.
Here are a couple of traps to avoid:
- BE AN ADVERB & ADJECTIVE HATER
“The Chow Chow sadly waddles up the plush scarlet-carpeted, serpentine-twisting rug, woefully stopping under the plumb Ming Dynasty vase, dumbly lifting his hind leg…”
You’re writing a screenplay, not the Great American novel. That means not killing the reader with purple prose. Just because you can write effective adjectives and adverbs doesn’t mean you should. When it comes to pumping up screen direction, ask yourself: Do I need it?
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August 8, 2011
This article from MovieBytes (a great resource for information about screenwriting contests) has some solid tips about how to improve your screenwriting, but this tip is the one that stood out to me most:
Don’t Be the Perfectionist
Examine your process – how you write the script. Let’s say you’ve outlined your script. You’ve blocked out time and are coming at it with good energy. You barricade yourself in with a copy of Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil, 18 bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon or whatever it takes to get you rolling. The pages come out, but look like crap. What the $#@*! Why?! Remember this scene in Amadeus?
God speaking to you lately? It doesn’t happen. There are going to be so many rewrites, polishes, trims, tucks, cuts…the script in constant revision mode. Don’t be a perfectionist. Don’t keep rewriting the same 30 pages.
I’ve seen good writers lose confidence this way. They can’t get the scene down, but they won’t let it go. You have to push forward. That’s the purpose of the rough “discovery” draft. Push forward, say everything you want to say in rough form. If, at the end, you’re looking at 140 pages, so what? You’ll know what needs to be done by the time you reach the end. Don’t censor yourself. Push out. Get the rough draft done, then refine.
Trust yourself!
Read the other tips here.
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August 5, 2011
James Hull has written a great article on Screenplay.com about how to figure out your main character’s arc. In most cases, if your main character doesn’t have an arc, you don’t have a compelling story. Needless to say, this article is an important one to read:
Many a story begins with a great character. That flash of inspiration that says I have to write a story about this person. Yet, so many stories stall out just short of that all-important finish line. Why is that?
The answer can often be traced to misplaced focus. So much attention is placed on fleshing out the character and providing them with greater and greater sources of escalating conflict, that the basic logic of their actual arc breaks down. In fact, sometimes it’s not even there at all.
There is a simple dynamic that exists within all Main Characters, defined by the chasm between a problem and a solution.
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May 9, 2011
Here’s another great article from Michael Ferris (THe NPH picture will make sense once you read the article). When you get to the end of the article you’ll notice that Michael includes his email address in each of his articles. I would highly recommend taking advantage of this resource. I once emailed Michael with a question about one of my scripts, and he got back to me within two days with a thoughtful, in depth response that was extremely helpful.
But on to the tips:
1. Make White Space Your Best Friend
In today’s spec market, unknown writers can impress by doing one thing: writing a “fast” read. Sometimes, this can compensate for lack of things like character arcs, or the occasional on-the-nose dialogue. Mind you, this won’t fix poorly plotted or structured stories, but writing a fast or “quick” read can make you seem like more of a seasoned pro than you might be. If you read scripts from the 50s, for instance, it will be light years different from the type of scripts written nowadays, and one of those key differences is how the physical pages of the script look. Back then, they looked much more like novels. Now, they look like someone took a chop shop to a novel, and left the body of the car on bricks.
Whether it’s a consequence of our shorter attention spans or not, industry people have even less time than ever to read spec scripts from unknown writers. One of the ways to set yourself apart and become their best friend is to give them a “quick” read. So what does that mean?
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