Advice

OK! You've got a terrific script! How do you get it read, and how do you sell it? The first step, of course, is to get good representation. One of the most important things to look for in your representative is whether or not s/he knows the marketplace. It is extremely important that your representative knows what the studios are looking for and the person at each studio who is looking for it. With the success of 'American Beauty,' many of the studios are looking for quirky, edgy, offbeat movies, which would have been very hard to sell a year...

I've never been good at telling the truth. From the time I first encountered stories as a child, I understood that they were meant to be manipulated, details added or deleted toward a desired result. I suspect the situation is the same for most memoirists. I suspect we have trouble with the unalterable truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and that we turn to memoir because it provides us with a legitimate way of lying. To supporters of memoir--writers and readers like myself, this may seem a shocking statement, a betrayal of sorts, ill-considered in its confession,...

Experienced writers know that plot and character are like Siamese twins: if one is terminally diseased, the other is doomed. While a solid structure is essential to a good screenplay, it fails to guarantee characters whose behavior continually seems both inevitable and surprising. The system of personality typing known as the Enneagram offers a powerful technical tool for developing original and dimensional characters. Familiarity with the nine basic types can help us sharpen conflicts between characters to make dramatic situations more compelling. Being aware of the connections between story genres and Enneagram types provides insights into why we are drawn...

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...