Notes from a Screenreader: Hoarder Edition
Photo via Go Into the Story. A first draft is a hoarder house. It is piled full of things of great value to the writer, things that feel necessary and beautiful and valuable, or at least are too nice to throw away. The experience of the reader to the hoarder draft is, “Why are you...
READ MORENotes from a Screenreader: Pitch Me
Photo via Go Into the Story. Ninety seconds is more than enough time to pitch a well-defined story. The elements that make a story interesting and easy to envision, when stripped of less important trappings, can fit on an index card. Nowhere was this more apparent than at the Austin Film Festival Pitch Finale Party...
READ MORENotes from a Screenreader: Well, Obviously
Photo via Go Into the Story. The post “Writing Advice So Obvious It Gets Overlooked” covers the most fundamental of all story fundamentals (thanks to the marvelous writerlyn at Musings from a Young Hollywood Professional for reblogging this brilliance). It is advice that deserves a thorough looking over. Whose story is it? Very obvious, but...
READ MORENotes from a Screenreader: Bad Contractors Build Great Characters
Photo via Go Into the Story. Like badly built houses, when your characters suffer from faults in their very foundation they can get by just fine with good weather. But when conditions turn ugly, their weaknesses begin to show and the drama starts to happen. To make a really great character, think like a bad...
READ MORENotes from a Screenreader: This Stake Is Undercooked
Photo via Go Into the Story. Stakes are the thing in the story that makes a reader care what happens. Your fun characters and snappy dialogue and careful plotting literally do not matter if nothing much will happen if the plan doesn’t come together. And the stakes can be anything, really, as long as they...
READ MORENotes from a Screenreader: Where Do I Begin?
Photo via Go Into the Story. Your story has a beginning, a middle and an end but they don’t necessarily have to appear in that order. A good beginning has lots of things happening in it, things that make the reader curious about what’s going on. Once the reader is curious, they are hooked. Don’t...
READ MORENotes from a Screenreader: Where’s Waldo?
Photo via Go Into the Story. Do you feel like you’re looking for your second act in a giant Where’s Waldo poster? You know it’s there somewhere, but so is everything else in the entire world. Efforts to find Waldo shouldn’t show in your final draft. It’s imperative for clarity that you don’t submit a...
READ MORENotes from a Screenreader: Don’t Whimper
Photo via Go Into the Story. Your ending needs a bang. Settling gently down to Fade Out from the end of Act Two does not an Act Three make. Don’t hold back. Act Three is a balloon you keep inflating until it explodes. Push it as far as it will go. Tie up loose ends...
READ MORENotes from a Screenreader: Size Matters
Photo via Go Into the Story. Your page count is the first thing that happens to a reader after your title. Somewhere in the 90s is ideal, but a good script at 110 is fine. How can you tell if you need 110? I will give you a thousand dollars for every page you can...
READ MORENotes from a Screenwriter: Entitlement
Photo via Go Into the Story. A good title tells a story for you, honing in on the theme and tone. When a reader scans a list of titles, a strong one puts them in an optimistic mood. Keep it short. A short title suggests that you know exactly what your story is. A long...
READ MORENotes from a Screenreader: Bonsai for Beginners
Photo via Go Into the Story. It looks like it grew naturally, its boughs and crown pleasingly asymmetrical in the way wild things grow, but you can hold it in your hands. Bonsai looks entirely wrought by nature and time, but it’s a painstaking process of complete artifice. Constant bending, pruning, grafting, wiring and clamping...
READ MORENotes from a Screenreader: Breaking Hearts for Fun & Profit
Photo via Go Into the Story. Statistically speaking, you do not have a serious antisocial personality disorder. It’s difficult for you to choose to hurt people intentionally, to throw the only copy of their manuscript into the fire, seduce their massive crush, or cut up the one dress they have to wear to the ball....
READ MORENotes from a Screenreader: Rethinking Dialogue
Photo via Go Into the Story. Dialogue is a necessary evil, according to legendary director Fred Zinnemann, and writers of spec scripts should print that out and tack it up over their monitors. It is the polar opposite of telling your story visually. So why do you need it at all? As director Kelly Reichardt...
READ MORENotes from a Screenreader: Penn & Tellering
Photo via Go Into the Story. Here’s a great magic trick. A magician carries a dollhouse onstage and places it on a table. He says it’s a haunted dollhouse. Every time he takes the cloth away after barely an instant, the haunted dollhouse has produced a fire in the fireplace or a bloody doll massacre or...
READ MORENotes from a Screenreader: Dialogorrhea
Photo via Go Into the Story. There are scripts about people doing things and there are scripts about people talking about things. One of them has a much better chance of making it past the first round of readers in a competition. Visualize the beat. What is the visual information in the scene? Do your...
READ MORENotes from a Screenreader: Right Hook
Photo via Go Into the Story. A spec script with a real hook jumps right out of the pile. It’s the difference between an indestructible cyborg from the future relentlessly attempting to murder Sarah Connor and Sarah Connor, for instance, getting a message from the future that she should start taking self-defense classes while she...
READ MORENotes from a Screenreader: GOOOOAAAALLLL!
Photo via Go Into the Story. Many a spec script hits page 20 at a dead run, then pulls a hamstring and limps all the way through the second act while the writer chips away at what the story is actually about. It’s painfully slow to read. All of that should be resolved in rewrites,...
READ MORENotes from a Screenreader: Discuss
Photo via Go Into the Story. Discussions are the enemy of drama in a spec script. They are info swaps to give the reader story information, which is like putting stale bagels out for guests: unwelcoming and hard to swallow. It’s more accomplished work to compose images that do the same job. Crazy, Stupid, Love opens...
READ MORE
