Advice

We've all heard the warning against overwriting our screenplays by including too much camera direction or too many slug lines. We worry about getting it wrong, because we're professionals. Or at least we want our scripts to make us look that way. A little knowledge about how the pros use shot headings will go a long way toward equipping us to make a professional impression with every page we write. More than that, it will empower us to harness the power of shot headings to propel readers through pages that would otherwise bog down - or might not get read...

What makes an Academy Award-nominated script? As I wrote my newest book on three Academy Award-nominated films - Sideways, Shakespeare in Love, and Crash - I wondered if it would be possible to find patterns that seemed to be true for most of these films. I wondered if it would it be possible for a writer to analyze the patterns we see in Academy Award-nominated films, in order to learn to write up to the level of a great script. As I looked at the many films nominated over the past twenty years, I began to see some patterns that...

It's been more than two years since the last Writing in Restaurants, and in that time I've come across many new writing-friendly venues. Today, I'll be serving a five-course meal of writing tips as I introduce you to some of my latest favorites. Unless otherwise noted, these aren't plug-in or wireless venues, but they're wonderful places to stoke your creativity nonetheless. Square One Dining, Los Angeles, California Get your writing day started right with what may be the best breakfast in town at this outpost in Silverlake. They open at 8:00 AM and close at 3:30 PM, serve breakfast all...

In my previous articles, The Essence of Story, Beyond Theme: Story's New Unified Field, and The Metaphor is King, I pointed out that all great stories have the same underlying, universal structure - namely, there is a threat, either agent or perpetrator, that creates a problem that brings about a change to a state of misfortune and is the main source of resistance that opposes the action when someone tries to solve the problem and restore a state of good fortune. In stories that end tragically, it's the reverse - the story starts in a state of good fortune and...

Most writers end up writing at least twice as many scenes as needed to produce a compelling story. One skill that defines a good writer is the ability to know which scenes to keep and which ones to kill off. As a plot consultant, I developed two visual plot tools to help writers select those scenes that best advance the story and then make those chosen few truly great. The Plot Planner approaches plot from the overall story level and The Scene Tracker breaks down plot at the scene level. Both of these tools support writing plot as a layering...