Advice — brad schreiber

When I founded the Mona Schreiber Prize for Humorous Fiction and Nonfiction in 2000, I did it to honor my mother, who wrote articles for magazines and newspapers, and taught writing in San Mateo County in Northern California. When I formulated the rules for entering the contest, I thought I would never have a problem with any entries. Writers would simply read the rules, in Writers Market, on the website or elsewhere, and that would be that. What planet was I living on? Based on my administrating the MSP, and judging other prose, screenwriting and playwriting contests, here is a...

Having been the director of development for TV/film director Jonathan Kaplan (Unlawful Entry, The Accused, NBC's E.R.), I had the unique and special opportunity to read screenplays, as well as fiction and non-fiction books and articles, to see if there was anything which might interest him as a directorial assignment.Anyway, it's funny (funny-pathetic, not funny-funny) how you can notice certain simple, common failures after reading one or two thousand screenplays.Applicable to drama or comedy, these obvious faults aren't any laughing matter. As a young screenwriter hoping to open doors with a script or your first film based on that script,...