No one can doubt that Stephen King is one of the best horror novelists ever. However, if you examine Stephen King’s work carefully, you can see that he excels as a novelist but fails as a screenwriter. The best Stephen King novel adaptations were done by other writers (“Misery” and “The Shawshank Redemption”) while Stephen […]
One of the biggest problems many novice screenwriters face is completing their first screenplay. Writing a 110-120 screenplay can be daunting so it’s likely you’r first screenplay will be mediocre at best because screenwriting is just a skill. The first time you try anything whether it’s knitting, baseball, or cooking, you simply don’t know what […]
Think of every story as two halves where the first half is the opposite of the second half. In the first half, the hero pursues a goal and finally achieves it. Then the second half is where things start falling apart for the hero, but this second half represent the opposite of the first half. […]
The midpoint of every story is the moment of highest happiness for the hero. That’s when everything looks perfect, but isn’t. That’s because the hero only achieves a physical goal, but fails to achieve an emotional goal. Every hero has an initial goal. That goal can be divided into a physical goal and an emotional […]
Every hero begins the story with a fatal flaw. By the end of the story, the hero has changed to become a better person. Since the hero can’t change on his or her own, the hero needs two characters: a mentor and a villain. The mentor helps the hero until the hero is able to […]
Stories fail for several reasons but the common reason for failure is poor story structure. Story structure simply takes the audience on a journey from beginning to end, much like a train might take you on a journey from beginning to end. At all steps of the way, a story needs to explain what’s going […]
Most screenwriters make the mistake of thinking the villain only exists to oppose the hero. This simplistic thinking creates bad movies where the villain only seems to exist to cause problems for the hero and rarely seems to have a goal of his or her own. The better way to think of your villain is […]
Look at the worst James Bond movies and James Bond essentially remains the same from beginning to end. But if you look at “Skyfall,” you’ll see that James Bond begins the story as a seemingly old and washed up agent who can no longer do the job. By the end of the movie, James Bond […]
There’s nothing more disappointing than when someone makes a promise to you and then fails to keep it. That’s also what makes movies disappointing as well. Watch the trailer for the “Free State of Jones” and it looks like it’s a movie about a man fighting to establish a free state in the middle of […]
There’s a recent movie that got extremely high ratings on Rotten Tomatoes (88%) called “Everybody Wants Some!” If you watch the trailer, it looks like an interesting story about college during the late 1970s. However, the trailer basically shows you all the best parts of the movie. Why this movie was rated so highly by […]