Advice — expert series

I read thousands of proposals a year for my Roy W. Dean film grants. I know what wins grants and what turns judges off quickly. Getting it right can be a piece of cake. Documentary film funding starts with a well-written, organized proposal. It outlines your film's story, background, and need. It also outlines the approach, structure and style in four to eight pages of dynamite passion. Getting started may seem like the hard part, when really, it is the best part. Just write page after page of your vision for the film. Don't worry if you only need a...

You're considering a move into writing for animation. After all, you've always liked animation; you have a feel for fantasy - talking animals, stuff that flies - and maybe you already have a background in live-action writing which should give you a head start, right? Well, yes and no. The fact is, animation is more than just talking animals, and much of what makes it work is not obvious on the surface. There are a number of key components which lie at the heart of animation and one of the most important is its special relationship with action. This relationship...

In this article, I will introduce you to a new phenomenon called the Storywheel, which brings all the different types of story together into one grand design. To help picture the Storywheel, visualize a wheel with eight spokes. Then, starting at the bottom section on the right side and moving counter-clockwise, number the eight separate pie-shaped sections in between the spokes from one through eight. All great stories, ancient or modern, have a place on this wheel, and when taken all together in this way, they reveal their deeper, more amazing secrets, not the least of which are all the...

An agent flings a promising work against the wall. When asked why, she rages about all the times she has read entire manuscripts only to be disappointed in the end. She softens as she explains how, by the time she reaches the final quarter of the story, she longs for the work to succeed. If it fails, disappointment stings all the more. Agents, editors, directors, audiences, and readers alike expect the scenes of a story to add up to something meaningful in the end. The End is the Beginning T.S. Eliot said, "The end is in the beginning." The beginning...

Archangel Shecky makes an arrogant pronouncement that he can teach infallible, irrefutable, unassailable, one-size-fits-all formula for success. "Who is this blowhard who makes such an astounding claim?" you ask. I'm glad you did. He's the lead character in my most recent book, and instructional novel called Breakfasts with Archangel Shecky. He claims to be an angel, but if he is, he's different than most angels you and I have ever known (not that we've known that many). He likes his scotch and since the story takes place in Philadelphia, he likes all the foods that Philly is famous for -...