Advice — expert series

"Cardboard characters!" writes a story analyst, putting the finishing touch in the comments section of his story report. "No tension!" writes another gatekeeper, check marking the dreaded word "pass" on her studio coverage form. Lack of real, empathetic characters is the leading reason why agents and production executives pass on scripts. In today's competitive market, it is imperative to create the kind of full-bodied characters that mesmerize gatekeepers and bump your script up to the next level. Happily, capturing the kind of well-developed characters that dazzle buyers is simply a matter of understanding the four basic personality types. Hippocrates, often...

High Concept is a term that's been confused, misunderstood and misused by writers for decades. The common belief is that it's any movie that can be pitched in one sentence. A man who battles his wife for custody of their children is one sentence, but it's a million miles from being High Concept.Others define it by describing it as "one film crossed with another film." In Robert Altman's The Player, the writers pitch their project to a producer as Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman. That is not what a High Concept film is. What they used is a framing...

Every story spans a period of time. Story can be defined as conflict shown in scene, meaning that most writers will treat time in scene rather than in summary. An example of a partial scene from Rick Bragg's memoir: Ava's Man: "Charlie felt the hot rush of shot fly past his face, and his legs shook under him with the boom of the gun. But it was a clean miss, and he started to run at Jerry, closing the distance even as Jerry fished in his pocket for another load. Twenty feet. Jerry cursed and broke open the breech. Twelve...

EXT. - DUSK - CHICAGO STREET In a traveling shot, we see JOSEPH TAMBERLIN, a homeless man of 47, asleep between two garbage cans in a trash-littered and stinky alley. He has long, dirty blond hair streaked with grey and pulled back in a ponytail secured with a child's discarded scrunchy. His eyes are bluish-green and he has a large mole on the left side of his bulbous, sunburned nose. Joseph, who goes by "Joe"came from London 15 years ago when his marriage to Stephanie broke up and has yet to lose his accent or the embarrassing lisp he has...

"It seems important to me that beginning writers ponder this--that since 1964, I have never had a book, story, or poem rejected that was not later published. If you know what you are doing, eventually you will run into an editor who knows what he/she is doing. It may take years, but never give up." --Joseph Hansen The best secret I can teach you about writing a great query letter is that less is more. Writers feel the need to cram their letters with information, to widen the margins, lengthen the page, even take several pages. They go on about...