age: 51 (Jan 18, 1962)
MEMBER SINCE: February 2004
occupation: writer, lawyer, gallery manager
makes me sad: rejection
heroes: Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Clifford Odets, Arthur Miller, Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov
makes me happy: acceptance
into: books, movies, music.
most humbling moment: I wrote a screenplay about rejection, and it was rejected.
fantasy: To receive an Oscar and a star on the Walk of Fame
Observations on Starting a Script
You get the idea from screenwriting teachers like John Truby and Chris Soth that script writing is essentially a left-brain activity, one requiring extensive pre-planning. For Truby, it's a 22 step method. For Soth, it's eight. Even Syd Field's method requires the author to know, at the outset, the beginning, the end and two plot points.
All these methods represent an extreme left-brain approach to writing, one that makes genuine creativity difficult, if not impossible. I'm not saying the conscious mind shouldn't enter into the creative process. It's just that, as Walter Kerr said, it should "arrive late and tidy up." How Not to Write A Play (Dramatic Pub Co 1998) p. 40
Besides advocating that the author know the plot ahead of time, some screenwriting teachers claim that the writer should begin with a thesis or, as Lajos Egri would say, "premise." In The Art of Dramatic Writing, theater director Egri maintained that every play can be reduced to some aphorism such as "true love never dies" for Romeo and Juliet. That is the premise, which the playwright should keep in mind when writing a play. Likewise, John Truby, in Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller, speaks of making a "moral argument." But whatever terminology they use, they're saying the same thing: A play or screenplay should try to prove something, and the author should consciously shape the material to fit that proposition.
Ibsen wrote this way in his thesis plays, but this method is contrary to the way most fiction writers work. Most fiction writers start a story, not with a thesis (true love never dies) or even a theme (love), but rather something much more specific: an image, a situation, or even a phrase. Walter Kerr, who advocates this method, speculates that, when writing The Glass Menagerie , Tennessee Williams may have used the phrase "gentleman caller" as his...
You get the idea from screenwriting teachers like John Truby and Chris Soth that script writing is essentially a left-brain activity, one requiring extensive pre-planning. For Truby, it's a 22 step method. For Soth, it's eight. Even Syd Field's method requires the author to know, at the outset, the beginning, the end and two plot points.
All these methods represent an extreme left-brain approach to writing, one that makes genuine creativity difficult, if not impossible. I'm not saying the conscious mind shouldn't enter into the creative process. It's just that, as Walter Kerr said, it should "arrive late and tidy up." How Not to Write A Play (Dramatic Pub Co 1998) p. 40
Besides advocating that the author know the plot ahead of time, some screenwriting teachers claim that the writer should begin with a thesis or, as Lajos Egri would say, "premise." In The Art of Dramatic Writing, theater director Egri maintained that every play can be reduced to some aphorism such as "true love never dies" for Romeo and Juliet. That is the premise, which the playwright should keep in mind when writing a play. Likewise, John Truby, in Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller, speaks of making a "moral argument." But whatever terminology they use, they're saying the same thing: A play or screenplay should try to prove something, and the author should consciously shape the material to fit that proposition.
Ibsen wrote this way in his thesis plays, but this method is contrary to the way most fiction writers work. Most fiction writers start a story, not with a thesis (true love never dies) or even a theme (love), but rather something much more specific: an image, a situation, or even a phrase. Walter Kerr, who advocates this method, speculates that, when writing The Glass Menagerie , Tennessee Williams may have used the phrase "gentleman caller" as his...



























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