What Comes First, Character or Story?
Yes. On to the next blog post. Okay, I’ll expand. This is a question that keeps being asked of writers over and over again. There is no easy answer. I think it depends on the writer and the inspiration. Art …
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Log Lines
What is a log line? Put simply, it is your elevator pitch. It is your story in three or four sentences. This is not an easy thing to do. You spend months, maybe even years, on your screenplay, then you …
Hunting Artifacts
No need for a whip and gun, that’s not the kind of artifacts we’re hunting today. The artifacts I’m talking about are created in the rewrite process. They appear from one draft of you story to the next. Sometimes, as …
Writing Scenes That don’t Exist
So after I wrote my last blog on Christine Conradt’s GLAWS presentation, I thought I’d check out her two articles in the two “Now Write” books. In, “Now Write! Screenwriting” she has an exercise called “The Scene That Doesn’t …
GLAWS Special Speaker Event: Christine Conradt
Less than twenty-four hours ago as I write this, I was attending Christine Conradt’s presentation on Creating Strong Female Characters. Going into this, my thought was, “how is creating a strong female character different than creating a strong male character?” …
Perfecting Your Premise
Back in September of last year, GLAWS’ monthly speaker event featured writer Art Holcomb. Mr. Holcomb has been a writer for fourty five years working in film, television, theater and comic books. The topic of this event: Perfecting Your Premise …
INTERVIEW: TONY TADARO
Over the course of this blog I have mentioned GLAWS, the Greater Los Angeles Writer’s Society, of which I am a member. GLAWS is a great organization of peers helping peers and professionals mentoring aspiring writers. I am in one …
The 100% Character
Back in USC Cinema/Television we had a professor that would talk about the 100% Character. That is a character that will do ANYTHING to achieve his goal. This kind of character is either extra dangerous or extra courageous, depending on …
Where the Weird Ideas Come From
When I was a senior in high school, I was in AP English. Once in a while our teacher, Mr. John Durand, would get a new piece of educational material to look at and comment on. He would then pass …
Thanks For Nothing, You Useless Reptile
With “How to Train You Dragon 2” out, my wife and I pulled out our DVD of the first movie. After watching it, we watched the deleted scenes. Since I’m in the process of editing my own script, it occurred …