I follow this blog By Scott Meyer on Twitter and often find valuable and practical tips for screenwriting. Here is a series that gives a good overview of one writer’s process.
How I Write A Script at GoIntoTheStory
My personal writing process is much less thought-out, so I appreciate Scott’s way of defining steps, and the discipline and intentionality that is so important for a working writer.
This is a great TED presentation by Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the bestselling book, “Eat, Pray, Love”.
As she considered the daunting task of continuing her writing career in the wake of a smash hit, she began to wonder about our cultural expectations and assumptions about creativity. More importantly, she began to ask about the source of that creativity. Her conclusion is that what our culture decided post-Enlightenment is that creative genius must come solely from within human beings. This idea has also led to the stereotype of the tortured artist, living on the edge of an often self-destructive lifestyle.
Ms. Gilbert rejects that idea as an ideal or something we should settle-for. She argues for reclaiming more of a classical idea of creativity coming from alongside and from outside of a human creator. While she doesn’t come at this conclusion from a Biblical worldview, I really resonate with what she says because I know the True Source of creativity.
A committed atheist went undercover at Jerry Falwell’s church. What she found might surprise you…(from Patheos)
Be sure to watch the video interview with Gina at the end of the article.
Reading: “Reading the Bible With The Damned” by Ekblad. Moving away from the safe and conventional to the marginalized and alienated.
It takes an immense amount of discipline to resist spoon-feeding your audience. And it takes the same discipline to solve story problems by writing only dramatic scenes, not expositional scenes.
I read a post that talks about this topic this week on Go Into The Story, one of my current favorite blogs. Scott Myers collects an amazing variety of great screenwriting tips, scene analysis from famous films, and general wisdom from great screenwriters.
In this post, Scott re-posts a letter from David Mamet (if you don’t know him, you should find his stuff) that was written to his writing team for a television series Mamet was writing a few years ago. In the letter (there is some colorful language – it’s Mamet) he exhorts his writing team to be disciplined to write scenes and dialogue that serve to move the story forward dramatically.
It’s the bane of every writer to have to deal with collaborators (not the word Mamet uses to describe the network executives) who make suggestions. Often the suggestions (or orders) come in form of a request to make the story more clear, fill in blanks, flesh out characters, etc. And, too often, this results in dreaded exposition speeches by characters or the inane dialogue that spells out what the audience probably already knows and would enjoy discovering for themselves. Mamet colorfully outlines his criteria for what needs to happen in a scene for it to be worthy to remain in a script.
Watch a short clip from a film with the Director’s commentary. In this case, South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-Ho’s “Mother”. I love these NYTimes interactive features. I think they really take advantage of the potential for electronic publishing, especially for cool things like film analysis.
Click here to watch and listen: Anatomy of a Scene: Mother – Interactive Feature – NYTimes.com.
Of course, this is a film that almost nobody has seen, but I like the way the director tells the story and builds the tension in creative ways with interesting camera angles and pacing. What do you think?
MindSoulStory 