Advice

Our Reader Mark McC from Canyon Country (not too near Hollywood), CA writes: Coming to L.A. has not at all been what I expected. I've tried to follow the experts' advice, like get a job in a production company, but that was impossible. My boring job in property management is not why I left St. Louis. How am I going to morph into a working screenwriter? Richard Walter, Chairman of UCLA's Screenwriting Department, responds: First off, time is what makes up your life - your precious time is limited, so pick and choose wisely. First and foremost, you gotta write...

What a high: you've typed 'end of play' and that full-length stage play you've labored on for the last eighteen months is finally finished. Time to send it out to Broadway producers and get that rave in the New York Times you've always dreamed of. ADD REALITY HERE.Finishing a first draft of a play is great. But it's like building a house. If you tried to sell that 'first draft' house, buyers would wonder why you're selling a house without wiring, plumbing, coverings on the walls ... you get the idea. Ninety-nine percent of the time, you only get one...

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...

What is the essence, or heart and soul, of a great story? There are seven critical elements: the change of fortune, the problem of the story, the complications, crisis, climax and resolution of the classical structure, and the threat, which is by far the most important. In this article, we will examine the threat and its relationship to the other six critical elements that constitute the very essence of story -- that without which there would be no story. The first element is the change of fortune. There is an entity (i.e. an individual, a family, a town, a country,...