Advice — expert series

-- About The Screenwriter Who Decided To Write A Comedy? There was a moment in your life when you acknowledged to yourself that you were funny. Maybe you were trying to be funny. Maybe you weren't. Maybe it just slipped out. But somebody laughed. It might have happened when you were in second grade, a freshman in high school, senior year in college or when you were out of school and into a career. Somebody laughed. You liked saying funny things. Maybe you even loved it. Getting laughs did something to you. Maybe it built up your confidence. Made you...

Want to double your chance for success in this business? If so, we strongly suggest you write with a partner. Yes, you have to find the right person, and when you start selling your scripts, you'll split the money, but we, and the successful script partners we've talked to, agree that the advantages of sharing the writing far outweigh the disadvantages of sharing the bottom line. It would take a book (and we wrote it!) to explore all the reasons to write with a partner, so we've assembled the consensus Top Ten, as follows: 10. It's a dog-eat-dog business -...

Each year hundreds of screenplays become feature films. And each year thousands of teleplays become television episodes. Opportunity-wise, televisions's got feature films beat. TV's got the heat. The magic. The glitz. All that's missing is you. How do you change that? Well, first you've got to dedicate yourself to the Game. Accept the fact that TV is a personal business. It's about YOU first and your talent and ability second. Your next step is to adopt the "career" mindset. In television almost no one hits the jackpot with one script. In television we make a reputation for ourselves, amass credits...

To read Part I of this Series, click here. To read Part II of this Series, click here. In the first two parts of this series I began an examination of the true source of unity in a great story and how that unity can be achieved. I introduced you to eight of the elements that can influence that unity and add significantly to the clarity, meaning, and power of your work. The unifying forces we examined so far are: (1) The Value Being Pursued, which are the cherished values like justice, health, wealth and freedom that we pursue in...

"Only connect the prose and the passion,and both will be exalted." - E. M. Forster Emotions are the lifeblood of characters and of stories. Without emotional characters, you are just writing events, but you're not drawing your audience into your story. To be a successful writer, you want to create emotional characters so your audience will become emotionally involved with them. It's important for readers and viewers to become completely engrossed in the emotional world of your characters. As a script consultant and writers' psychotherapist, I've analyzed thousands of scripts during the past 20 years where so much attention has...