To Ryan Dixon, of Baseline Research, for giving me the forum that Scriptshark.com provides. To Ken Lee and Michael Wiese for their continuing support and encouragement. To Beth McCauley for her insight and love. To the MWP family for their sense of community. To my students, a never-ending source of amazement, material, and excuses. And to Arthur Dreifuss, who believed in me thirty years ago.

Introduction

There are a lot of books on screenwriting, one of which is my own — Rewrite, A Step-by-Step Guide to Strengthen Structure, Characters, and Drama in Your Screenplay — which help you get started on the process of writing a screenplay. This is not one of those books. This is a companion book to those. This is an easy-reading book of short chapters which you can peruse just before nodding off, or even skim while in the smallest room in the house.

The chapters, none of which is more than a thousand words, deal with a wide range of subjects related to screenwriting and movie and television making in general. Some of them could be classified as purely opinions, while others are very specific craft issues ranging from punctuation to meaning in your screenplay.

Originally blog posts on Scriptshark.com, a subsidiary of The New York Times Company, these chapters don’t necessarily need to be read in order to be appreciated. As a matter of fact, I encourage you to cruise the table of contents and then read an entry that interests you or that relates to an issue you’re having with your screenplay at the moment. Are you struggling with creating a viable antagonist? There’s a chapter on that: “The Antagonist as a Good Guy.” Do you have problems establishing an emotional core in your script? Then read “Three Stories, One Script.” Is story your issue? There are several chapters dealing with story including one on Katy Perry’s use of story in her concerts.

There are chapters on credits, when to abandon a story, specific movies, even one on “What Film School Should I Go To?” As you can see, chapters range from very specific advice (where to put a semi-colon or how to format a phone conversation) to broader pieces designed to get you to think about the art as well as the technique of screenwriting.

You may not agree with me on everything, but that is not my goal. My goal is to make you think about your writing in new ways and to give you tools to express those thoughts. I’ve kept this introduction short — about the length of most chapters — to get you to open the book and explore its contents for yourself. Please do so and let me know your thoughts on the MWP Facebook page.

Step 1

In The Beginning

Has this happened to you? You’re at a party and someone starts talking to you and finds out that you’re a writer. Two types of conversations invariably start (once they’ve asked you if they’ve seen anything you’ve written. How would you know what they’ve seen?): 1) I have a great idea. Let me tell it to you; you can write it; and we’ll split the profits. 2) I have a great idea, I just don’t know where to start.

If it’s the former, you should just stop the conversation with, “I’ve got so many of my own ideas I haven’t written yet, I just can’t take on another project,” because it’s practically guaranteed that the other person’s idea is no more thought out than “something about flowers” (actually pitched to a former writing partner for a Twilight Zone episode), or my office/house/school is a real sitcom. These are not ideas. They are nothing. And the hard part is not coming up with an idea, it’s expanding that idea, developing it enough so that it really is something, and then writing it. So, in fact, if you say yes to that profit sharing, it should be 99% for writing it and 1% for the “idea.” That will shut them up.

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