Advice — expert series

This article can be appreciated by all writers and filmmakers but will be of special interest to writer / storymakers who are trying to decide where to best invest their creative energies and talents - the novel or the screenplay. I'll begin with some general observations concerning the novelist and the filmwright (a new term I'm coining to describe a film's true primary creative artist) and then I'll describe the similarities and critical differences between a novel and a screenplay.The novelist creates and describes everything that appears in the novel -- the characters, the emotions of the characters, their actions,...

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...

"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...

The three act structure is not a story structure. You can't find it in myths and legends or other great stories of the past and you can't find it in nature. So why is it being applied to the screenplay or the story of a film? It's a good question because it makes no sense. And my very strong recommendation in this article will be that you avoid thinking in act structure terms when creating a story or story film. The three (four, five, six, or seven) act structures are the arbitrary divisions of the principal (or main) action of...

In the previous issue, we examined interdependent journeys, obstacles and destiny, and how all of these might affect the journey and the characters in your work. In this, the final installment, we'll take it one step further, and see if we can't explore the very boundaries of the journey. This means considering a journey that leads to a journey, a character that doesn't journey at all, and the very purpose for the journey itself. Why do readers need journeys after all? The Journey that Leads to a Journey The problem with resolving a journey is that the reader feels he...