hecklongtree

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...
Read More

What makes a story compelling? What makes a book or screenplay one you can't put down? Or a DVD one you have to watch all the way through, as opposed to one you can easily stop at any point in the movie?

As I see it, storytelling, in whatever medium, is about raising questions, and good storytelling is about providing satisfactory answers. In a mystery,...
Read More

The "objective correlative” is a concept I came across somewhere in my readings—don’t ask me where. Loosely, it’s the external manifestation of a particular emotion. Seeing as cinema is concerned largely with externals, that is, visuals, I thought the concept would have great applicability to film. Thinking I had hit upon an important and highly original insight, I performed an internet search to see what,...
Read More

In “The Dramatist’s Toolkit,” Jeffrey Sweet discusses different ways to structure a play. One is to structure a play around a character. The character structured play tracks the protagonist as he or she achieves, or fails to achieve, an objective. Another method is to structure a play around an event. In a courtroom drama the event is a trial. The play tracks the course of...
Read More