What is tone and what are the rules? Succinctly, don’t mess tone up because your script will have the weird vertigo feeling that comes from moral dissonance. Tone is a simple emotional language you’re already familiar with, unless you’re a psychopath. Or a replicant. To keep a consistent tone, think “How will this action be…
Read moreIf the Story Starts on Page 50…
Take out the first 49 pages and we’ll talk.
Read moreveracity24: THE BEST DIAGNOSTIC TOOL FOR EXAMINING THE DRAMATIC STRENGTHS & WEAKNESS OF YOUR DRAFT SCREENPLAY : THE DRAMA REPORT This will help you.
Read moreHEART WITH A SIDE OF HEART
annerocious: Even if you’re the world’s most cynical misanthrope and your story expresses the ultimate futility and pettiness of the human race, you need a heart. You can’t make anyone care about characters who don’t really care. There is a cheap shorthand you should avoid, which is assigning motive. I’m killing him because he killed…
Read moreWhat Your Spec is Not About
Make it about one thing. Because it takes time to write a script, first drafts tend to turn into lint traps for whatever is busy developing in the writer’s life. Pro tip: This includes popular media. I have read scripts that morph recognizably into Jane Austen or True Detective or Broad City halfway through. Be…
Read moreIf You Did Not Cry Like A Bitch
Then you don’t know how a sequence works. It is a perfect lesson in theme, suspense, character, subtext, reversal and plot.
Read moreTime and Your Rewrite
You have full power in your universe to dilate and contract time exactly as you see fit. How long things take on the page depends entirely on how important they are in your story. When you go back to rewrite, consider how you use time. After your first draft, you can start shrinking your first…
Read moreThis Marvel Thing
Is why you really have to set up your payoffs.
Read moreHow Your Spec Is Like A Selfie In A Filthy Room
The part of the picture that matters to you, being you, looks good. But you left in fifteen extra themes, a bunch of setup that has no payoff and a bunch of payoff that has no setup, a full layer of exposition in dialogue that should be shown in action and how can you not notice…
Read moreShe is selling seashells
Is called present progressive, which is a useful tense with a useful grammatical aspect, just as Arial is a useful font. Neither of them belong in a screenplay. It’s a natural way to describe what you see in your head. “She’s sitting over there, he’s making coffee, the dog is chewing a sex toy.” However, readers…
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