Advice

Having been the director of development for TV/film director Jonathan Kaplan (Unlawful Entry, The Accused, NBC's E.R.), I had the unique and special opportunity to read screenplays, as well as fiction and non-fiction books and articles, to see if there was anything which might interest him as a directorial assignment.Anyway, it's funny (funny-pathetic, not funny-funny) how you can notice certain simple, common failures after reading one or two thousand screenplays.Applicable to drama or comedy, these obvious faults aren't any laughing matter. As a young screenwriter hoping to open doors with a script or your first film based on that script,...

Does your animation script seem a little flat? Be honest. The problem could be that you haven't included enough contrasts in your script. Variety is just as important in a script as it is in a gourmet feast. Characters Build your script around your characters, and contrast each of those personalities as much as possible. List your main characters on a sheet of paper and then jot down the attributes of each underneath. Think of making each trait as different from the traits of the other characters as you can. In a comedy especially those contrasts are what make the...

When the first Emmy Award category honoring new media programs was announced, it ushered in unprecedented opportunities for screenwriters. Not since cable television has the industry experienced such a shift. Those willing to write for the Internet and portable devices now have the chance to gain recognition from the most respected leaders in the industry, and at the same time help shape the new cross-media form of storytelling. "It's the future of TV," said Brent Stanton, director of the Daytime Emmy Awards. "It was not hard to get this category launched -When setting this up, we had no idea how...

Think of the rose petals in American Beauty, the bird imagery in Shawshank Redemption or Leon's beloved houseplant in The Professional.These metaphors stay with us long after the movie. Like the sled in Citizen Kane, they work as visual synopses, remembered for their story content and emotional power. Often featured on movie posters, metaphors arrest us, instantly messaging a story idea in a single image.Extended metaphors, those that run alongside a character or plotline, can carry a great deal of the story load. They can enter a scene with stealth or a loud bang. They have an elasticity that allows...

In last week's installment of my book, A Dash of Style: The Art and Mastery of Punctuation, we began to discuss ways that quotation marks might be misused. In this final installment, we'll examine this issue in depth, and also look at the power of quotation marks when used in context with other punctuation. In some trendy works (and classic works, too) you'll find that authors opt not to use quotation marks at all, but rather to indicate dialogue with some other mark, such as a dash, or italics, or no mark at all (not to be confused with paraphrasing)....