Your villain defines how your hero will achieve his or her goal. Once you define your hero’s goal, you’ll need to define your villain’s goal. The most important goal is your hero’s goal. Basically, your hero has two goals: an initial goal and a primary goal. At the beginning of every story, the hero’s initial […]
Every movie is a mystery. You tease the audience with tidbits of information and once you’ve got them hooked, then they’ll want to see how it all turns out. Every movie essentially begins in the middle of some action that we don’t quite understand. If a movie truly began at the beginning, it would be […]
Avatar is the latest blockbuster movie that’s visually stunning and breaking box office records. But at its heart, it’s still an easy to analyze story. “Avatar” may be visually stunning, but it’s still a basic story that can be divided into eight distinct segments. Act I — Exposition Part 1 — Jake Sully is the […]
Blockbuster movies like “Avatar” make millions of dollars in profit, but here’s why you should avoid trying to write a similar story like that. When most people want to write a screenplay, they tend to make several mistakes. The most common mistake is to look at what’s popular today and then write a copycat story. […]
Every interesting story has a backstory, which is what happened to the characters before the story gets started. To make your story richer and deeper, make sure you create a backstory that supports your hero’s goals. Watch two strangers meet each other in a room and it’s polite, trivial, and ultimately boring. That’s the way […]