Advice — expert series

In celebration of the paperback release of Noah Lukeman's seminal guide to punctuation, A Dash of Style, The Writers Store is pleased to present a four part series of excerpts from the book. Some authors, like Camus, Carver and Ernest Hemingway, used the period frequently. Others, like Faulkner, were sparing. Why? What possible difference can the placement of a period make? Does punctuation, in general, really have enough of an impact to warrant the toil of master authors? The answer is yes. And any discussion of punctuation must begin with a discussion of the period. The period is the stop...

The arrival of Daylight Savings Time three weeks early this year heralds the approach of a long stretch of summer for you to finally get cracking on that screenplay you've always wanted to write. There's only one obstacle: Where to find a fresh story to whet the appetite of prospective producers and appease moviegoers who are hungry for a plot they can really sink their teeth into. If you're gleaning a slick segue here to the topic of food, it's a theme that figures prominently in Where the Plots Are, my current work-in-progress which affirms the fact that extraordinary muses...

Special effects have evolved in the last several years into the "Swiss Army Knife" of filmmaking. At one time, special effects were only used for "physical" needs such as rain, smoke, wind, explosions, breaking glass, bullet hits, etc. With the advances in technology, a filmmaker now has access to "digital" effects, which can do just about anything. Do you need to add a river to a scene? No problem. Do you need to make that one-story building look like a ten-story high-rise? Done. Do you need to erase that airplane that accidentally flew through your scene, and while you are...

Most of a writer's genius comes in the art of the finesse. How finely you craft your project before you let it go is up to each individual writer. As a plot consultant, I developed the Scene Tracker Kit to help writers finesse their scenes. A story comes alive at the scene level for the audience, be it a crowd or an individual reader. Well-written scenes allow both the observer and the reader to viscerally take part in the story. Some people rather enjoy a more distanced, intellectual challenge. Most, however, engage on an emotional level, too. Each scene has...

As conscious artists and enlightened-entertainers-in-training, we have to fight a never-ending battle for our art. Or so it seems. Our implements of war are not guns and bombs, but awareness and attention. And the only enemy we ever truly have to face is "the enemy within our own household." (Mystically speaking, this refers to our consciousness.) Finally, the greatest "act of war" we can take is to "be still and know," to "take our bloated nothingness out of the path of the divine circuits," as Emerson would say. Still, we fight skirmishes almost daily. Mapping out the terrain we want...