“The Giver” was a popular young adult novel about a community that eliminates emotions in favor of sameness. The idea is to create the perfect utopia by eliminating pain, fear, greed, and envy. If everyone is drugged up, they’ll feel the same way all the time and not want to create any problems. The problem […]
Watch sequels and they often feel inferior to the original because they’re not complete stories. If you never saw the original, the beginning of most sequels assumes you already know the main characters, so there’s little understanding what the characters want. Even worse, many sequels simply end without completing the story. Think of “The Empire […]
Exciting and memorable stories don’t have the most action, but the greatest emotional appeal. To create a story with a strong emotional core, identify a dominant belief that your story presents in one sentence. “Thelma and Louise” — Women live in a male-dominated world. “Titanic” — Don’t let others define your life. “Miss Congeniality” — […]
The best stories move us emotionally, so if you want to create the best story possible, start by tapping into a strong emotion of your own. Once you know what strong emotion you want to communicate to the world, the actual plot and story you tell will be far better due to your emotional involvement. […]
Divide a typical 120-minute movie into eight segments and you get eight 15-minute segments. Each 15-minute segment the hero must be pursuing a goal. In “Die Hard,” the goals of these eight 15-mintue segments look like this: Get to the office party. (Success) Make up and get back together with his wife. (Fail) Escape terrorists […]
Murphy’s Law states that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. The screenwriting world is no different. You want to make everything go wrong as far as possible. In an early draft of the script to “Sex Tape,” the couple that frantically tries to retrieve their sex tape are afraid that if their bosses […]
The next time you watch any two hour move, time your watch to the one hour mark. When you hit the one hour mark, notice how everything seems to be going well for your hero. Then notice immediately afterwards how everything starts to fall apart. In “The Interview,” the hero is a Hollywood gossip talk […]
In every story, someone is haunted by the past. Often times it’s the hero, such as Rick in “Casablanca” who’s bitter over a broken love affair that we gradually learn about over the course of the story. Other times the character with the haunted past is the mentor, such as the handyman/karate instructor in “The […]
Every hero faces a seemingly impossible goal. Sometimes that goal can be earth-shattering such as in “Terminator 2” where the goal is to kill the evil Terminator to prevent a global nuclear war that will destroy much of the human race. Other times the impossible goal can be much simpler but still daunting such as […]