“Nope” is the much anticipated film from Jordan Peele. After the superb “Get Out” and the decent “Us” horror films, “Nope” got decent reviews about the story’s theme. Yet if you focus just on the main characters, there’s really very little story. The hero is a man who loses his father when strange debris rains […]
At the end of every scene, you need to leave on a cliffhanger to entice the audience to keep following the story. A cliffhanger gets its name from the old serial movies where the villain would leave the hero dangling off the edge of a cliff and audiences would have to come back next week […]
Novices often do information dumps where a character vomits out information solely for the audience to understand the story. This often creates phony dialogue like this: BOB: Be careful, Jane. Remember the last time you slipped on a rock, you hit your head and had to drop out of school so you could recover and […]
A good rule of thumb is that if the action and dialogue in a scene could take place in a submarine, in a field, or in the middle of a city street equally well, your scene has a problem. Every scene should make the setting an integral part of the scene. One way to do […]
Every story is about resolving a single problem. In “Soul,” that question is what is a soul’s purpose? In “Titanic,” that question is how do you want to live your life? To solve that question, the hero must overcome challenges and change to become a better person. For the hero to change, he or she […]
Here’s one trap that many novices fall into and never get themselves out. They focus on creating an idea and then believe that idea is their ticket to success. In reality, ideas are nothing more than empty air. Everyone has ideas. When people spend all their time coming up with ideas but never implementing any […]
Every year, people write thousands of screenplays. Out of those thousands, a very small percentage are actually any good. Out of that small percentage of good screenplays, only a handful ever get made. When writing screenplays, the odds are against you. To maximize your chances, you must get past the script readers. Since script readers […]
Conflict is the heart of any story. If there’s no conflict, there’s no story because there’s nothing for the characters to do. However, there are different levels of conflict. At the simplest level, conflict is anything that stops the hero from achieving a goal. A simple conflict might be a flat tire or having trouble […]