Occasionally I’ll have a fiction student invade a film and video class. Their “head” is different. I’ll look at their screen description and see liberal use of adjectives and adverbs. Dense detail, terrific stuff. Because, in the fiction world, a novel can be 300 or 800 pages, they have the freedom to embellish not just […]
We talked before the importance of character arcs. I’d like to illustrate a few more famous characters and their journeys. The hope is it helps you think about your own characters and their journeys. I mentioned in the last article that characters gotta change. Like every other screenwriting rule, this one can be broken. Let […]
Last week we talked about beating down your protagonist–manipulation of audience emotion through them connecting to your characters. One sure way for them to connect is to have them identify with the character, and then mercilessly, relentlessly, beat them down. Many movies have done this in many ways. I showed some examples last week that […]
Dues. Gotta pay your dues to sing the blues. The lead character must pay dues. Is that true? Sympathy = Punishing Your Protagonist. Wondering how true is the truism. It’s common for movies to beat down the protagonist. It’s not done randomly. The filmmakers want us, the audience, to react to the beat down. We’re […]
Dorothy Parker founded the “hate writing, love having written” school. One of her beefs was rewriting. As every one of us knows, you can stare at a problem scene for hours and just be stuck. You know the damn script better than anyone but it doesn’t help get you to any sort of solution. You […]
