Advice — advice

Pacing, as it applies to fiction, could be described as the manipulation of time. Though pacing is often overlooked and misunderstood by beginning writers, it is one of the key craft elements a writer must master to produce good fiction. Best-selling author Elmore Leonard recommends simply 'cutting out everything, but the good parts.' While this is interesting advice, the following article covers the matter of pacing in a bit more detail.The elements of time delineated in your story or screenplay include the time of day or period; scene versus summary; flashback; and foreshadowing. Elements of time raise the following questions:...

Did you know that million-dollar, A-list scribe RON BASS works an average of 14 hours a day, seven days a week? Or that ERIC ROTH likes to wake up in the middle of the night, write for a few hours, take a nap, start again in the morning and continue in the evening?Highly successful screenwriters are the most disciplined people I know. They make the time to write, face the blank page, produce a consistent amount of pages every day and deliver high quality scripts on deadline.But rather than listing all their common habits (you can read about 101 of...

There are many ways symbols that can be used in a movie. Today I will examine one of them.Alan Ball, the screenwriter of 'American Beauty,' makes riveting use of the color red throughout the film. The first time we see Annette Bening, she's cutting bright red roses.What does the color red mean in this movie?The way Ball uses it, it refers to a concept: the life force, which, by nature, tries to defy the suppressiveness of suburban life. That's why, the first time we meet Annette Bening, she's cutting red roses. She's cutting the life force. Shortly thereafter, we see...

Everyone loves a love story. But this apparently simple tale may be the most difficult form to write well, for a number of reasons. First, love is the only genre where you need not one, but two equally well-defined main characters. You know how hard it is to give depth to one character.With two, you not only have to detail their weaknesses and needs, you have to track a goal for each character that won't kill the story drive.Second, the love story has a plot where surprise must come out of intimacy. This is different from almost every other major...