There’s no reason that writing male characters should pose a problem for female screenwriters. The differences between us may seem like a gulf that can only be crossed with a bridge of sandwiches, but we have a lot of common ground. When writing male characters, remember: Don’t be shallow. Avoid defining them by how much…
Read moreREVENGE CHARACTERS
CAUTION. When you create a character to settle a score with that bitter teacher or boss from the patriarchy or the douche who screwed the girl you were crushing on, remember that humanizing them is more effective than demonizing them. To really assassinate someone in a revenge character, they can’t be flat on the page…
Read moreABANDON YOUR PRIVILEGE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE
I’m not prejudiced against young, fit, good-looking white people, they have their own set of specialized problems I can’t relate to, so I wouldn’t presume. But they are only one subset of people. The joy of writing spec scripts for competitions is that you’re not bound by the market. It’s not a prize for the…
Read moreHEART WITH A SIDE OF HEART
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 my…
Read moreAND IT’S GOING TO BE NON-LINEAR
WHAT IF MY V.O. IS REALLY ENTERTAINING AND I DON’T USE IT AS A CRYSTAL BALL?
CHEATING ON YOUR PROTAG
Sometimes your protag gives up the fight to be the most interesting person in the script. We’ve all been there. That one supporting character who takes off, not coincidentally when the second act gets a little mushy. It’s not okay for this to happen. It’s unfaithful. Protags sometimes sag under the weight of their goodness…
Read moreMOTIVATION: GO ORGANIC
Trying to hit dramatic beats on certain pages leads to motivation drift. I read a script about a relationship, and on a given page it was time for them to break up, so they had a fight. Except the fight was completely unmotivated and required that the girlfriend end the relationship over an issue that…
Read more“WE WILL COME TO KNOW HIM AS…”
BACKSTORY
There is a lot of backstory that doesn’t belong in your script. It feels important to put on the page, to explain things and illuminate characters, but it’s more interesting to the reader NOT to know everything, to guess and speculate and draw our own conclusions. Bonus points if we get it wrong and that’s…
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