Advice — expert series

As a screenwriter, you may use other script consultants to critique your material, but inevitably you'll need to master the ability to analyze your own work. This can be a difficult task, somewhat akin to trying to look at your own face (without a mirror). If you are going to write at a level that sells, however, you will need to rewrite. And rewrite. And rewrite. But do not despair, you're in good company. Many screenwriters struggle over evaluating their own work. I still have bloodstains on my office walls where I pounded my head as I rewrote one script...

A story that made a big impression on me was "Little Red Riding Hood." I was ten and my mother said to me, "Who's the main character in the story?" I thought for a moment, and said, "Red Riding Hood." "How so?" "The story is called that," I said. "Little Red Riding Hood." "You think so, do you?" my mother said. "I think it's misleading. She's not in the story very much. What about the Wolf? Why don't you take a look at the story from the Wolf's point of view? Ask yourself how the Wolf feels about all this?"...

The phone rang.It was a big shot producer from a major studio. "Hey, Ken, I love what you've done! What a great idea! I'm gonna steal it from you."Was he talking about one of my scripts? No. What he was talking about was - well, read on.Let's say you've had a pitch meeting. (And I'll talk about pitching later in this article.) The producer likes what he's heard and the usual line is "Send me a one-page synopsis."So you go home, knock yourself trying to condense your 118-page screenplay into one page.And what you write sucks.It reads flat, you've left...

I can absolutely guarantee you, based on more than twenty years experience, that the second thing a reader (be she a script reader, development exec, agent, producer, or studio head) will do when she gets your script, is thumb through to the end to see what the page count is. The first, of course, is to read the title and name, possibly your agent's name and contact info. But the most important issue for her will be the length. What? Length over quality? You mean to tell me you'll be judged on length? Not exactly. Here's how it works. Readers...

The run-up to Oscar season has produced a surprising development in the ecology of ideas that underlies our popular culture. Hollywood storytelling has long been dominated by a high-speed linear form that packs as many thrills into two hours as possible. The time span of the story is short. The impact on the audience is emotional. And the change in the hero is almost always psychological. When the moral element does show up, it is limited to a simple lesson no deeper than a platitude. But recently a very different model of storytelling has appeared. These stories often frame a...