Advice — expert series

It's easy to feel intimidated by the thought of writing a screenplay. The rules! The formatting! The binding! Don't let the seemingly endless parade of screenwriting elements scare you away from writing your first script. Since a familiarity with the basics of the craft is half the battle, The Writers Store has provided you with resources, a screenplay example, and overview on how to write a screenplay to help you get up to speed on screenwriting fundamentals. Combine that with the right screenwriting software, books and supplies, and you'll be ready to type FADE IN before you know it.Enter your...

You don't need to go to film school to recognize the key elements of great movies. These same elements are present time and time again in the great movies, and they are worth highlighting: These movies tend to have strong single line - with one overriding problem or goal for the hero - to give the story drive, momentum, and a sense of priorities, or in the extreme, a sense of the first cause. These films occasionally digress from that strong line to allow the film to "breathe." That is, they play with the structure to comment on what is...

George Clooney, Ben Stiller, Jon Favreau; just a few of Hollywood’s actor-writer-director multi-hyphenates whose careers offer the lesson that to prosper in show business, not to mention fully express your creative vision, it helps to be a “triple threat,” “wear three hats,” “pull triple duty,” call it what you will. For writers, even if the “actor” and “director” part of the equation doesn’t interest you, the importance of being a multi-hyphenate more than helps, it’s essential. For no one is this truer than for comedy writers. Choose what best fits you. Maybe, storyteller-TV writer-tweeter. Or, screenwriter-blogger-standup. Or, novelist-playwright-cartoonist-essayist. But to...

One of the major Achilles’ heels for film producers and directors is the distribution game. Once you’ve made your movie, what do you do? How do you play the game? What strategies do you employ? Is there even a strategy? Well, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is there are indeed strategies to use and employ. The bad news is that most filmmakers don’t know what they are, and flounder around trying to figure them out. What’s even worse is too many filmmakers throwing in the towel and just dumping their film online, hoping it “hits” somehow....

The Monster story is one of the favorite types of Myth Archetype: the main character goes through an Outer Story, and that Outer Story symbolizes an Inner Story of emotional change.  Monster stories have been popular for centuries. Initially, a monster of some kind menaces the hero and the community. In Beowulf, the village is threatened by Grendel. In the first James Bond movie, Dr. No, the world is threatened by a monstrous supervillain. The monster can be an extraterrestrial monster, as in Alien, a monstrous animal, as in Jaws, a monstrous human, like Glenn Close’s character in Fatal Attraction,...