flying wrestler

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...

When I first started writing, people who read my scripts sometimes said they lacked conflict. This drove me insane. I grappled for years to really...

Like many screenwriters I have been influenced by and used the precepts in Chris Vogler's classic The Writer's Journey, where he lays out the...

We writers tend to be obsessed about how our characters change in a story. How they grow. What they learn. Their "inner journey" from beginning to...

I see the 3 stages of a script as follows:

1. Idea/concept
2. Structure/outline
3. Actual script pages

You can probably guess from the title of my book which one I think is most important…

My book THE IDEA: The Seven Elements of a Viable Story for Screen, Stage, or Fiction is now a course!

For the past six months I’ve been preparing for these two days of shooting the videos for it and am happy to report it’s a wrap!

A lack of character agency can really sink a script. And it's one of the most common key issues I see in movie and TV projects I read. Agency means...

I've saved "Monster in the House" for last in my series of posts about the ten genres in Blake Snyder's Save the Cat books. Partly because it's not...