Advice — john truby

Hollywood is interested in one thing: a script with blockbuster potential. Why? Because the revenue from films is now global. The typical hit film makes more money from foreign revenue than it does from the U.S. Couple that with the exorbitant cost of making and selling a film and you've got an entertainment community that won't even look at a script unless it has blockbuster written all over it. That's a big problem for most screenwriters. Most writers, if they have any training at all, never learn the techniques for writing hit films. In fact they don't even know such...

Don't be fooled by the notion that no one knows anything. Buyers may not know if a particular script will make over $100 million, but they have a pretty good idea of certain major story characteristics found in most blockbuster scripts. The top professional screenwriters -- the ones who get all the jobs -- know what they are, too. While the vast majority of screenwriters are off pounding out their simple three-act scripts, top screenwriters are using fundamentally different techniques. Three-act structure is designed to give you the same script everyone else is writing. Plus it tells you nothing about...

The Thriller is one of Hollywood's most popular forms because it combines the criminality and surprise of the detective form with the danger and pressure of horror. A good thriller puts the hero in danger early and never lets up. While the thriller usually involves a main character trying to find a murderer, it has very different story beats than the detective genre. Each beat is geared toward wringing every last ounce of terror from the hero and the audience. Thrillers tend to want to be small. It's like putting your hero in a box and squeezing. One of the...

Everyone loves a love story. But this apparently simple tale may be the most difficult form to write well, for a number of reasons. First, love is the only genre where you need not one, but two equally well-defined main characters. You know how hard it is to give depth to one character.With two, you not only have to detail their weaknesses and needs, you have to track a goal for each character that won't kill the story drive.Second, the love story has a plot where surprise must come out of intimacy. This is different from almost every other major...

Spoiler Alert: DO NOT READ this breakdown if you haven’t seen the film. It is impossible to say anything useful about the writing without discussing the critical plot twists. With the tidal wave of superhero movies coming out of Hollywood, I get very excited when a serious crime story like Gone Girl comes along. Which is also why I was so disappointed when Gone Girl turned out to be a lot less than its hype suggested. This isn’t a bad film or a bad script by novelist Gillian Flynn. But it has serious problems. Some were embedded in the original...