Advice — expert series

Screenwriters do not write movies.Screenwriters write scripts. And scripts are not movies.Movie audiences are people sitting in a theater, or at home, having a visual experience complete with actors, music, directing, editing and perhaps digital effects. The audience for a script is a reader. And all they have is the written word.When I was starting out, I was told a script is a blueprint for a movie so you should never write anything that can’t directly be seen on the screen. Nor should you indicate how a line should be read because it will insult the actor playing the part....

My recently released book, The Film Director’s Bag of Tricks: How to Get What You Want from Writers and Actors, was obviously designed for directors. But this book is only one leg of the triangle. How about: Actors getting what they need from directors and writers? Or how about: Writers getting what they need from directors and actors? Sounds like two more books. I could start a series like Chicken Soup for the Soul. I’m not about to do that but I do want to talk about something very important that is not in the book: How writers can meet...

Doesn’t it seem as if a new screenwriting book is published every twenty minutes? I bear no small portion of the blame, as my third such tome burdened bookstore shelves just last year. What’s left for me now to write except a book about writing screenwriting books? My longtime pal, beautiful Viki King, author of the timeless How to Write a Movie in 21 Days (I asked her, ‘Why should it take so long?’) told me that the writers of such books do not actually compete with one another. Writers don’t buy one or the other but several such books....

How many screenplays do you have to write before you throw in the towel and delete your screenwriting program from your computer? 17? 12? 3?It depends on how seriously you take your screenwriting career--even if you don’t technically have a career, just a bunch of scripts that have: a) been rejected (if you’re fortunate enough to have had them read by someone in the industry even if they said no). b) or if you have a bunch of scripts that haven’t been read by anyone except your significant other and your film buff cousin who thinks “Citizen Kane” is overrated...

The reality of reality is that the genre may be the most often overlooked option when it comes to careers in storytelling. While the debate about whether or not reality television is “written” rages on, the real skinny is that story is story, and story is written - sort of. Pause for a moment to consider host copy, interview content and carefully structured stories that can span the length of a single episode to the full duration of a series. Life doesn’t just tumble through a lens and spill out the other side of a cable as a series of...