www.scriptfrenzy.org Quotes

Now. What are you doing still reading this? You’ve got writing to do!

Opening your imagination to the ridiculous opens your mind to what you’re not otherwise seeing. In other words, it makes room for the genius to come through.

A structural approach to screenwriting requires patience and discipline, but the rewards are great. You might find if you spend three weeks hammering out your story, the actual screenwriting will take only a week.

Think of story as the plan and screenplay as the execution. A screenplay is a story told in scenes, each scene necessary to tell the story. At this stage you’re just testing if each scene is necessary. When planning a screenplay, I try to write the story in prose first, without dialog, with each scene represented by either a sentence or a paragraph. Then I read and revise the condensed story, omitting what is unnecessary.

And that’s the goal: writing that’s ALIVE.

Lacking inspiration, I tried to take CONFIDENCE from adhering to “classical” dramatic form. And my writing just died.

I don’t think you can get around it: good writing’s INSPIRED. Period.

I think living with all that failure makes us vulnerable. It makes us weak. And it explains why all those goddamn screenwriting books fill the bookstores. Don’t be fooled, friends. They can’t save you.

What was it Nietzsche said? That which does not kill us makes us... well, depressed.

I’m not very comfortable giving advice to other writers. Writing just doesn’t come easy for me. Actually, it’s pretty much constant FAILURE.

Writers awaiting feedback are in a very vulnerable position. Yes, yes, we have to have thick skin but writers are sensitive, let’s face it. This is not a new toilet we have installed; our stories are our hearts.

Put yourself in the other person’s shoes. You put your heart and soul into the script, for months and weeks. And now somebody is going to pass judgment.

We’ve all been burned by bad feedback. Rude, insensitive, bossy, arrogant, wrong-headed, cruel even.

Once you've got your character – who by then hopefully has a name – what often helps is to do some daydreaming.

Good feedback is kind, thorough and timely. It's professional and focused. It leaves the writer feeling challenged to do better but great about their strengths. Even if that just means the location they chose was cool. Give your feedback relative to the skill set of the writer. Never lie or obfuscate. Just serve it up gently. An upset writer isn’t going to hear your points anyway. But an encouraged one will. Trust me on this.

We don’t give feedback to be right or superior or better. We do it to be constructive and productive. Given, I do this every single day; it’s my day job. So I’m pretty good at it. But if this is not normal for you, reading a script and giving notes, just remember to give feedback in the same way you’d want to receive it.

Why are you writing this particular story about this specific couple? Your romantic comedy should be posing a question, or poking at a truth, that you the writer are passionately invested in exploring. That’s the real key to involving an audience, and no amount of cute one-liners can take its place. Good romantic comedies speak to something that’s going on in the culture. So make your story matter to us. It wouldn’t hurt.

You may have a set, a setting, world, or a physical comedy opportunity that will open up and enliven your movie. Annie Hall takes place in a fairly mundane urban world, but it’s packed with sight gags, from the cocaine sneeze to the errant lobsters, and inventive visual ideas, from split screen to animation. Make sure your script makes use of all the cinematic storytelling techniques a good movie-movie uses.

So much of good comedy comes out of strong, vivid character ideas. Creating two unique characters an audience will fall in love with and need to see united is the most important key to your screenplay’s success. All great characters have purpose and credibility, are empathic and complex.

Not using dialogue can give a character an extra layer of personality. Think about the people in your life and their body language, the quirks they have and how it helps define what you think of them. One defeated shrug can speak to a character's entire philosophy of life... You've got the power to make your actors do anything you want, so use the hell out of that imagination.