Advice — claudia johnson

Want to double your chance for success in this business? If so, we strongly suggest you write with a partner. Yes, you have to find the right person, and when you start selling your scripts, you'll split the money, but we, and the successful script partners we've talked to, agree that the advantages of sharing the writing far outweigh the disadvantages of sharing the bottom line. It would take a book (and we wrote it!) to explore all the reasons to write with a partner, so we've assembled the consensus Top Ten, as follows: 10. It's a dog-eat-dog business -...

For years I gently browbeat my students. "Dig deeper," I said. "The best stories are about the human heart." I wasn't quite sure what I meant. I knew I didn't mean that old Hollywood saw -- throw in some love interest! I meant something closer to Samson Raphaelson's remark about Shakespeare in The Human Nature of Playwriting, "[He] is not a realistic writer but he is overwhelmingly real because he reports the hearts of human beings." I was teaching dramatic technique: first, playwriting in the English Department at Florida State, then screenwriting when the Film School began. I was rounding...

Some of the greatest movies and TV series have been written by script partners, from Billy Wilder's legendary collaborations with Charles Brackett and I.A.L. Diamond to the Academy Award-winning work of the Coen Brothers. Each year the list of script partners and their successes grows longer. Why? Because collaborative scriptwriting is one of the most productive and successful ways to write. If you find the right writing partner. Okay, you may be thinking, but how do I do that? It's a question many writers have asked us since we started our collaboration, and a question we've asked many collaborative writers....

Want to double your chance for success in this business? If so, we strongly suggest you write with a partner. Yes, you have to find the right person, and when you start selling your scripts, you'll split the money, but we, and the successful script partners we've talked to, agree that the advantages of sharing the writing far outweigh the disadvantages of sharing the bottom line. It would take a book (and we wrote it!) to explore all the reasons to write with a partner, so we've assembled the consensus Top Ten, as follows: 10. It's a dog-eat-dog business -...