“FOR ALL INTENSIVE PURPOSES…”
THE FIRST LINE OF DIALOGUE MAKES ME LAUGH
YOU CAN’T HAVE IT BOTH WAYS
OK. So you want to amp up your drama, your conflicts, your stakes. There’s this one thing you should stop doing: Justifying your protag’s bad behavior and letting him off the hook for it. Spec scripts have this incredible enabling parent mode towards their protagonists, and there are different reasons for it, but they’re all…
Read moreJUST FOR THE GENTLEMEN WRITERS
You don’t need to know how to write good female characters. You write interesting characters who are motivated by different, relatable things and all that will fall right into place. I totally get that it’s not always easy to pick how you’re going to write a character who is unlike you. So here’s a quick…
Read moreME READING ONE MORE DESCRIPTION OF A HOT GIRL STROKING HER BODY AS SHE GAZES WITH LONGING UPON THE PROTAG
shitroughdrafts: Godzilla, directed by Gareth Edwards. 2014. Order the Shit Rough Drafts book here! The reader’s life.
Read moreAND THE SUBPLOTS JUST KEEP COMING
IMPACT
boojum.as.arizona.edu Spec scripts have this tendency to fall back on dramatic near misses. Like, if Jane found out Pedro cheated, the wedding would be off, but thank goodness that didn’t happen fifteen different times, and here comes the bride. Actually, no. Jane finds out. Impact. Now Jane and Pedro have a megaton of ejecta material…
Read moreOCCAM’S RAZOR AND YOUR SCREENPLAY
Here’s a valuable tip for building your story. You have a guy, in a plot, and he sleeps with his friend’s girlfriend. That is legit story. Things will happen because of that. That will turn into other things. Conflict, confrontation, crisis. Yay! What is not particularly important is that he did it because in fifth…
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