Notes from a Screenreader: Breaking Hearts for Fun & Profit

nywift: 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…

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facebooksexism: thebluelip-blondie: skeptikhaleesi: brownglucose: nextyearsgirl: The absence of women in history is man made. How petty just look at babe ruth’s face tho so confused so lost i love it pure hater shit Jackie Mitchell…a bad ass lady I had never heard of.  Here is that awesome plot you were looking for.

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Headscratching Cliches: Part One

This is how large a spilled cup of coffee looms in the first ten pages of spec scripts. It’s right up there with running late for work and getting dumped. I do not know what a spilled cup of coffee is supposed to convey about a character or their situation. It is utterly meaningless. It…

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An Escalation You Can Use: She was Acting

Take a trope character. We’ll use The Distraught Mother for this example. She will weep, insist, fall to pieces. You see a distraught mother, a primal instinct takes over, nothing is important anymore except fixing this problem immediately. Coincidentally, people who get what they want by means of manipulation know this. So do screenwriters. Trope…

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Good writing is remembering detail most people want to forget. Don’t forget things that were painful or embarrassing or silly. Turn them into a story that tells the truth. Paula Danzinger (via videoassocdallas) Live in the heartbreak moments, because thats when people connect to characters (via killtheintern)

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Most of what you think you are conditioned to think. Who profits from what you believe? Follow that money trail for revelatory story.

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