Advice

In last month's excerpt from my book, A Dash of Style: The Art and Mastery of Punctuation, we discussed a few of the dangers of underuse of the period, as well as the role that context plays in punctuation. In this, the final installment, we'll continue examining the pivotal role of context, and take a look at what your usage of the period might reveal about you. In the hands of a master like Shakespeare, the context of period placement and sentence length takes on layers of meanings--indeed, is taken to a whole new level. Let's look, for instance, at...

Growth is the by-product of a cycle that occurs in nature; that which flowers and fruits will also eventually wither and go to seed. The seed, of course, contains the potential for renewal, but does not guarantee it, nor does the seed instantly spring to new life. There is a necessary dormancy where the possibility of death holds life in suspended animation. In the cycles of our own lives, these near-death moments are rich with heightened dramatic possibilities that the writer wants to capitalize upon. These are the moments in the human drama where the stakes are the highest, where...

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)....

This article can be appreciated by all writers and filmmakers but will be of special interest to writer / storymakers who are trying to decide where to best invest their creative energies and talents - the novel or the screenplay. I'll begin with some general observations concerning the novelist and the filmwright (a new term I'm coining to describe a film's true primary creative artist) and then I'll describe the similarities and critical differences between a novel and a screenplay.The novelist creates and describes everything that appears in the novel -- the characters, the emotions of the characters, their actions,...

High Concept is a term that's been confused, misunderstood and misused by writers for decades. The common belief is that it's any movie that can be pitched in one sentence. A man who battles his wife for custody of their children is one sentence, but it's a million miles from being High Concept.Others define it by describing it as "one film crossed with another film." In Robert Altman's The Player, the writers pitch their project to a producer as Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman. That is not what a High Concept film is. What they used is a framing...