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Soak up knowledge as writing experts divulge insider secrets and tips to help screenwriters, playwrights and filmmakers everywhere with expert writing advice needed to help hone the craft of writing. Whether it be novel writing advice, writer interviews, screenwriting advice articles, or general screenwriting help that is desired, these writing experts are focused on helping writers everywhere further their skills in every facet of writing.
Push Boundaries and Make No Excuses
As a script consultant, Dr. Linda Seger has worked with more than 2000 scripts, from 'The Neverending Story II' to 'Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.' Linda has also extensively studied the creative process, working with writers to jump-sta...
Read more... | Published: 12/31/01 | by Linda Seger
How Do I Critique My Own Work?
Can writers take a long honest look at their own writing? The answer is yes, but it's difficult. When we go back to read the words we've put on the page, we not only read the actual words, we relive the emotions we felt as we were writing. We see ...
Read more... | Published: 12/31/01 | by Leigh Michaels
Pretense, Pratfalls and Silly Walks: Why Characters make us Laugh
Humor is a perceptual experience that causes people to laugh. By definition, it is generated by a 'sudden radical deviation from expected patterns of behavior in a situation that concludes by being non-threatening to the perceiver.' That behavior ...
Read more... | Published: 12/31/01 | by Richard Michaels Stefanik
The Three Cosmic Rules of Writing
As a veteran writer and a licensed psychotherapist specializing in writers' issues, I know enough to know there aren't any rules when it comes to writing. Except for the following, which I modestly call the Three Cosmic Rules of Writing. I'm seri...
Read more... | Published: 12/31/01 | by Dennis Palumbo
How To Get An Agent
You're a hot writer! Already you can see your name on the front page of Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. But to make the magic work, you need an agent. Or rather, you think you do. Like a savvy cat who'll only agree to come to you when cream ...
Read more... | Published: 12/31/01 | by Marisa D'Vari
Fishing for the Hook
Often you'll hear producers, agents and others whom writers must deal with asking them for more of 'a hook' to their pitches or screenplays. What exactly a hook is, is rarely spelled out; they just know they want one. It's sort of like the problem...
Read more... | Published: 12/31/01 | by William Missouri Downs
Why Good Writers Keep Journals
Journals have been the secret weapon for writers from Allen Ginsburg to Virginia Woolf to Victor Hugo. Make it your secret weapon, too. Skilled writers have developed their own voices -- unique ways to express themselves. They have learned to ope...
Read more... | Published: 12/31/01 | by Ruth Folit
Do You Have to Live in Hollywood?
I wrote 'The Writer's Guide to Producers, Directors and Screenwriters' Agents' somewhat by accident. I quit Hollywood in disgust after two feature screenplays were purchased, but not filmed, this after years of options and some TV work, but no fea...
Read more... | Published: 12/31/01 | by Skip Press
Six Points About Character, Plot, and Dialogue You Wish You'd Have Known Yesterday
If you could sit down in a chair next to the editor of work by James Baldwin, Elia Kazan, Jack Higgins, Jacques Barzun, David Frost, Budd Schulberg, Dylan Thomas and Lionel Trilling, what could that editor say that would be immediately helpful to ...
Read more... | Published: 12/31/01 | by Sol Stein
The Matrix - An Appreciation
I loved The Matrix -- loved the action, loved the situation and characters, but most of all, I loved the idea behind the film. It was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the 19th century poet and literary critic, who coined the concept known as 'the willing ...
Read more... | Published: 12/31/01 | by Syd Field
Healing the Hollywood Heart
There are hundreds of ways your heart can break in Hollywood. The good news is that there are hundreds of ways you can heal it as well. Here are a few to utilize when you're just starting out. Have you seen the bumper sticker that reads 'Just Say...
Read more... | Published: 12/31/01 | by Viki King
Classic Story Structure Begins with Plot
What do we mean by Plot? Simply, plot is WHAT HAPPENS in a short story, novel, play or film. No more, no less. It isn't description or dialogue, and it certainly isn't theme. In the best stories, plot grows organically out of character, rather tha...
Read more... | Published: 12/31/01 | by Adam Sexton
How to Write Badly to Write Better
In a previous column, I noted that the magic bullet for writing success is to Be Good At What You Do. If you want to be a writer, learn to write. That earlier article practically guaranteed that if you became a good writer and continued to become ...
Read more... | Published: 12/31/01 | by Gene Perret
Do You Really Want to be a Screenwriter?
Almost every writer and every serious film fan at one time or another has at least considered writing a screenplay. Lured by the power of the big (or small) screen, and by stories of all the fame, success, awards and big, big money that other scre...
Read more... | Published: 12/31/01 | by Michael Hauge
The Ins and Outs of TV Series Writer Deals
The television business has undergone a dramatic change in recent years. In the past, studios would lavishly spend millions of dollars on long-term development deals with TV writers referred to as 'overall deals' in the hope that during the two to...
Read more... | Published: 12/31/01 | by Dina Appleton
The Mystery Defined
Mystery and detective fiction comprises a literature of questions. Who done it, of course, is the classic question. There's also what was done*? How was it done? Why was it done? An even more fundamental question, though, is this: what is a myster...
Read more... | Published: 12/31/01 | by Guy Magar
A Screenwriter's Challenge: Visualization
'Heck, we'll just write them, and let the directors worry about visualization!' More often than not, and consciously or not, this seems to be the mindset of most writers based on the many hundreds of screenplays that have crossed my desk at all l...
Read more... | Published: 12/31/01 | by Guy Magar
The Six Essential Habits of Highly Successful Screenwriters
Did you know that million-dollar, A-list scribe RON BASS works an average of 14 hours a day, seven days a week? Or that ERIC ROTH likes to wake up in the middle of the night, write for a few hours, take a nap, start again in the morning and contin...
Read more... | Published: 12/31/01 | by Karl Iglesias
Exercises to Nurture the Creative Process
Linda Seger is a popular consultant and lecturer who travels throughout the world speaking to new and established filmmakers on creative ways to make a screenplay great. In this segment of an in-depth interview she gave to Writers Store staffers, ...
Read more... | Published: 12/31/01 | by Linda Seger
Writing in Restaurants
Some writers do their best work hunched over the computers at their desks. Others work in libraries. Or at the beach. But I like nothing better than writing in a restaurant. While some people are terrified at the prospect of dining alone, for me i...
Read more... | Published: 12/31/01 | by Jonathan Dorf
What's My Genre?
I've spoken before in this column about the fact that 95% of writers fail in the premise. You may come up with a terrific one-line idea for a movie, but if you don't develop it the right way, the best scene writing in the world won't make a differ...
Read more... | Published: 12/31/01 | by John Truby
On Journaling
Journal writing is a wonderful way to know yourself and to discover exciting ideas inside you. There are many ways to apply journal writing. As a script consultant and as a licensed psychotherapist in private practice in Los Angeles, I have used j...
Read more... | Published: 12/31/01 | by Rachel Ballon
How do I Treat my Treatment?
Question: I have completed my screenplay, but I never wrote a treatment. I met a producer who wants to see a treatment only. Some people say a treatment should be three pages long, some say 12. Any advice? Michael Halperin, author of 'Writing the...
Read more... | Published: 12/31/01 | by Michael Halperin
Is it a Story Analyst or a Reader?
Question: I keep hearing about these mysterious story analysts who will be charged, hopefully, with reading my script. Who are they and what are they like? Marisa D'Vari responds: Story analysts (or readers, as they are sometimes called) come in ...
Read more... | Published: 12/31/01 | by Marisa D'Vari
The Myth of Sacred Writing Time
I would like to address a problem that many writers contend with every day. It's a problem that can delay a project's completion by a few days, or it can stop work dead in its tracks, leaving it permanently unfinished. It can hinder a single proje...
Read more... | Published: 12/31/01 | by Stephen Berger
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