Advice

(Excerpt from "Now Write! Screenwriting: Screenwriting Exercises from Today's Best Writers and Teachers", edited by Sherry Ellis & Laurie Lamson)A film, by its very nature, is a visual art form. However, I’ve found that new screenwriters tend to forget that they’ve ever seen a film in their lives. Too often, inexperienced writers go right for wall-to-wall yakking when writing a scene or sequence for a movie. While verbal dialogue drives television scenes, you want to write dramatically effective cinematic scenes for a feature film. An effective approach is to use The Seven Elements of a Scene or Sequence. Use them...

"I was incredibly impressed with the scripts, both the quality of the writing and the original takes on the concept. They really feel like movies." - Simon KinbergWant to know what the judges are looking for in the First 15 Pages? Click here to download the Finalists from this round of the contest.Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a winner! Join us in congratulating Mary Krell-Oishi on her victory in the Industry Insider Screenwriting Contest with Simon Kinberg!Mary Krell-Oishi’s script, “Secret Asian Man,” was selected by Simon and our panel of judges. She is soon to embark on her ultimate Hollywood...

A landmark interview series that goes far beyond the typical Q & A to really get down and dirty with today's top writing talent, The Dialogue: Learning from the Masters DVDs give you an unprecedented look into the life of a working screenwriter.From Academy Award winners Callie Khouri (Thelma and Louise) and Paul Haggis (Crash) to comedy writer John Hamburg (Meet the Fockers) and sci-fi team Alex Kurtzman & Roberto Orci (Star Trek reboot), each screenwriter discusses their filmography in intricate detail and provides an analysis of the inner workings of a favorite scene from their film oeuvre. This kind...

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create." - Albert EinsteinYES, BUT CAN I WRITE?This chapter hopes to journey you to the most illogical and wonderful places in yourself. And it won’t always make sense. There are no experts on how you should be creative. In fact, my first rule is: Ignore everything I or anyone else says that might impede your natural process and inhibit your courage to create. What works for one might disable another’s inspirational process.Human experience is unknowably...

Whether a screenplay deserves an Oscar nomination depends on how it reads on the page and plays on the screen. But if you want to learn how Hollywood’s best screenwriters got that way, you have to begin by determining the challenges they faced at the outset of their tasks. Then you can identify, and learn, the techniques they used to meet the challenges.For Oscar nominees, these techniques typically fall into three major categories: mixing and transcending genres, and connecting character to plot to theme. Best script nominees, even when they are indie films, not only combine two or three genres,...