Advice

'The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him.' --Graham Greene Plot does not magically appear with the creation of a character; Frankenstein's monster might open his eyes, but until he gets up from the table and DOES something, there is little basis for a plot. Plot comes with your characters taking action; with their interaction with others; with their traits being applied to imagined scenarios. A few issues to consider: PERCEPTION AND REACTION Two men stand in line at a bank at 2:50PM....

In many ways, we memoirists have it made. Our plots present themselves to us wholly realized; our characters come to us fully formed. By using our own lives as subject matter, we are spared the hard work of imagination that fiction writers must bring to their craft. You might say that we're already ahead of the game going in. If you were a writer fond of using sports metaphors, that is what you might say. We memoirists are already ahead of the game going in. We're like the junior league bowling team I was on in seventh grade. Because the...

What is the source of our creativity? How can we communicate with that source and use it to unlock the natural storyteller that resides in us all? Carl Jung called the source of our creativity the collective unconscious. Joseph Campbell, in his book 'Hero With a Thousand Faces,' called it the world naval. Religions call it God or the Holy Spirit. George Lucas called the positive aspect the Force. In my book, 'Stealing Fire from the Gods,' I call it the creative unconscious, the hidden truth, or the self. Here I will call it the inner creative self. You can...

Screenwriting is a craft that occasionally rises to the level of an art. An art because there are times when it taps directly into the human heart, transcending time, place, language and culture. A craft because it depends upon form, concept, character and structure. 'Magnolia' pushes the form of the screenplay to another level. Why and how were the questions I wanted to ask. How did the writer structure the film, and what were the elements that made it work? I hadn't seen 'Magnolia' when it was first released, and I hadn't seen 'Boogie Nights' or 'Hard Eight' either, so...

'La Grande Illusion' -- Jean Renoir's classic 1937 film revisited by author and teacher Syd Field partially excerpted from his new book 'Going to the Movies' My journey in film really began in the spring of 1960 at the University of California at Berkeley. It was my second semester there, and, at the time, I was acting in the production of Woyzeck. I was fortunate to be playing the lead character, and, after one performance, I was introduced the great French film director, Jean Renoir. His son, Alain, was on faculty at the University, and Renoir had just been appointed...