sunshinegoawaytoday: White dudes hold the record for creepy crimes, but females are strong as hell. The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt pilot will teach you everything you need to know about how to present exposition visually. Pay attention to how much you know by the time the credits are over. It’s a miracle! Also, it’s a fun…

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If you are looking for your second act, check the first act exposition. Annerocious

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I get a lot of resistance about my wrathful judgment of flashbacks. Here’s the caveat. Flashbacks are not the enemy. Unless they are lazy. Then they are the enemy. Like any other expositional scene that spoon feeds the reader information. A good flashback is dramatic and illuminating, like the flashbacks in The Usual Suspects, to…

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WHAT THE HELL IS SUBTEXT?

Writers of spec screenplays often make the mistake of explaining things to readers, as if there is no other way of being understood. Subtext is the opposite of that. Since the easiest way to demonstrate this is to write two scenes, one with subtext and one without, that is what I did. See if you…

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Everybody Mansplains

Mansplaining goes on in spec scripts. A lot. So as not to offend, I will call it the gender-neutral “screenplaining” instead. It is a structural problem that happens when the writer believes that readers need certain information up front to be able to properly interpret the story. However unintentionally, screenplaining condescends by assuming that the…

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FIRST WE MUST KILL ALL THE CLUNKERS

It’s late, your optic nerves are shriveling, your laptop is so hot it’s burning your thighs. You need to get from here to there, fast. You’re in a weakened condition. You take a shortcut, you shoehorn a raw and bloody slab of backstory into a conversation where it doesn’t belong so you can move your…

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