flying wrestler

Because of my experience working on Band of Brothers, writers often come to me for my opinion on war-related scripts and projects. I'm talking...

In the past I've blogged a lot about first acts - their beginnings, middles and ends, and about how second acts start, evolve, and end in a crisis....

Loglines are important not just because the industry requires them. They are perhaps the best way to look at whether your idea has the necessary elements to be a really strong story.

Writing is rewriting. How many times have we heard that? We get it: the first draft is probably far from the best, finished version.

When writing dialogue, it's easy to fall into the trap of "information exchange" scenes. This is when characters give each other information,...

Because of my work on Band of Brothers and other projects that involved adapting true stories, writers in my IDEA course or consulting clients often...

I find framing devices to be overused in the scripts that I read. More often than not, one of my first notes to a writer is that their opening scene...

As I've been brainstorming on my next script I found myself looking at the main character's external want and realizing that there really are a very...

When I was first starting out in the business, the question of what producers do, actually, was a big one. Eventually I got a producing title myself...

As audience members, we have to understand character motivations in order to engage with what's going on in a story. Ideally, most scenes are about...

“Bad Guys Close In” is the name Blake Snyder coined in Save the Cat for the second half of Act Two in a screenplay. I think it’s a useful way to...