This is the way most people come up with a story. They first come up with an interesting plot. That’s step one, but then they skip the next two steps and rush right off into writing the screenplay. Predictably, having an interesting plot is the least interesting part of any story and following this route […]

Watch trailers and you’ll immediately notice that they tell you what the story is about, the tone, who the hero is, and what the setting might be in about two minutes. If trailers can do all that in a condensed format, then one way to create your story is to imagine it as a trailer. […]

If you watch any bad movie, you’ll notice they almost always start with a good idea. Where bad movies fail is that the appealing idea goes nowhere. That’s because the real story people want isn’t the physical action of what happens but the emotional understanding of why it happens. A movie’s longline typically tells you […]

When athletes train, they often practice exercises that don’t seem related to their actual sport. For example, boxers jog and jump rope even though running and jumping have little to do with boxing. That’s because jogging and jumping builds stamina and that’s what boxers really need to cultivate. Likewise with screenwriting, study screenplays and watch […]

Watch a bad movie and chances are good you don’t care what happens to the characters no matter what challenges they may go through. They could avoid dozens of armed assassins, survive thousands of explosions and gunshots, and escape from attackers showing multiple car crashes — and you won’t care because you on’t care about […]

When people try to create a story, they often try to create something original, forgetting the fact that there are no original plots but plenty of original ways to tell the same plot. So the key to making screenwriting easier is to borrow plots from other sources. Before you worry that copying plots is beneath […]

All the special effects, explosions, car crashes, and gunfire in the world won’t make your story better. That’s because visual effects are fine, but lack substance without an underlying motivation for why all this visual fireworks are happening and what they mean to the hero. Conflict is not about bigger explosions or more gunfire. Conflict […]

Here’s the simplest type of story. A good guy is trying to achieve a goal and a purely evil guy is trying to stop him. That’s the basic plot of every bad James Bond movie and that creates a superficial story that relies on action, special effects, car crashes, and sex to make it even […]