The surest sign of a poorly written screenplay is when there are too many stories. Pick a mediocre movie like “The Eternals” and you have so many superheroes and they all have different goals. One Eternal looks like a little kid and wishes to be seen as someone bigger. Another Eternal is in love with […]

Watch a mediocre movie like “The Eternals” or “The 355” and you’ll see lots of action. However, all the explosions, car crashes, and gunfire in the world can’t hold anyone’s attention. What makes a story emotionally engaging is when the hero has a problem from the past that he or she needs to resolve. Sometimes […]

When you watch a great movie, it can inspire you, but can also intimidate you. After all, how can you write something even half as good as a great movie that everyone loves? Whenever you might feel intimidating or depressed about your chances of writing a great movie, you can cheer yourself up by watching […]

Watch any bad movie and you’ll almost always find that it had an intriguing idea. “The Layover,” which has a rare 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, is about two women who fall in love with the same man when their flight is delayed overnight. That’s actually an interesting idea as the two women, who are […]

Here’s a common mistake novice screenwriters make all the time. They describe a scene where someone gets killed right away. This technique was actually used in “The Phantom Menace” when a shuttle craft lands and immediately a bomb explodes, killing a woman who looks like a queen. The problem with this scene is that we […]

Every story is about solving a single problem. That main problem must be clear and unsolved until the very end. If this main problem isn’t clear right from the start, the rest of the story won’t seem to make any sense. In “Die Hard,” the main problem is that the hero wants to get back […]

One way to look at a story is to imagine it as a video game. In a video game, the challenges get progressively tougher, but the overall challenges are mostly the same. For example, a simple game like Donkey Kong is all about climbing levels to rescue a girl from a gorilla, all the while […]

Almost everyone can come up with a great idea for a screenplay. The hard part is turning that great idea into a collection of great scenes that will make up a great screenplay. What far too many novices do is simply write a scene that’s empty of drama. Just as a chain is only as […]