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“Imperfect” Film Classics – How to Break Screenwriting Rules – Part I Part of the beauty of independent cinema is that no one expects these films to match some sort of formal template.  While I love a well-constructed classic like Die Hard, I would definitely get bored if every film ended with the evil German … Read more

Three More Horror Films for Screenwriters’ Halloween It’s easy enough to take potshots at modern would-be “hommage” horror films.  The reason for this is because they don’t offer anything new. They actually just give us the same concept as something else: a bunch of young people in a remote farmhouse stalked by a demented killer; … Read more

Three Horror Films for Screenwriters — Halloween Edition Most horror movies are shit. There. I said it.  That’s not because there are a lot of cheap and nasty horror films out there. Actually some of those can be quite good. Or even if they fail, at least people are actually trying.  The problem, these days, … Read more

How to Write a Relatable Character for Screenwriters The next person who tells me a character needs to be “likeable” gets a punch in the face. “We need a reason to like your heroine; maybe you should give her a baby.”  “Your hero should Save the Cat in the first ten pages.” “I kept reading, … Read more

How to Engineer Coincidence for Screenwriters: Three Examples (and Two Failures) Contrary to popular belief, you want coincidence in your screenplay. Recall one of Pixar’s 22 Rules of Storytelling: “Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.” Think about it: how many great films would exist … Read more

Focus on What’s Different: How to Break the Rules as a Screenwriter Stop Worshiping Structure Screenwriting is more than just fucking templates.  Blake Snyder’s Beat Sheet, John Yorke’s Five-Act Structure, Aristotle’s Poetics all give us models for how a story should unfold. And of course these models can be somewhat useful. If you’re lost and … Read more

Part II: Use Irony in Film for Screenwriters – Creating Hooks  Are you one of those writers who wants to live in a broom closet, popping speed, chain-smoking and tapping away on a vintage typewriter, writing your brilliant script free-form on one uncut roll of paper like some Jack Kerouac manqué? You’re writing to entertain … Read more

Irony for Screenwriters — The Same as Dramatic Irony? A good heuristic is that the literal meaning of a statement is the exact opposite of the actual meaning of that statement. Or whatever Ethan Hawke said. Irony is of course a bit more complicated than that, at least in screenplay terms. In particular, Irony doesn’t … Read more

There’s nothing quite like reading the work of new writers. Ah… fresh meat writing fresher meat. It’s often a mishmash of scenarios that aren’t actual scenes, and lots of scenes that don’t really mean anything to the plot as a whole What we begin to see after a while is that people don’t really know … Read more