If you walk into a fast food restaurant, you expect to get a hamburger, fries, and a drink. You don’t expect to buy a sofa, oil paintings, or brake linings. Yet that’s exactly what many screenplays do. Every screenplay must let the audience know right from the start what type of story to expect. I […]

When you’re making up your story, strive to create the strongest scenes possible. One way to do this is to create the most unique, memorable action possible that people will forever identify with your story. In “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” everyone remembers the scene of a giant boulder rolling down a hill while Indiana […]

This is what far too many writers do. They search in vain for an original idea and then they try to write a story about that idea. The problem is that they either run out of ideas to keep the story going or they write endless action that serves little purpose other than to dazzle […]

Watch any good movie and you’ll notice that in rare cases, movie characters never go to the bathroom, brush their teeth, or clip their toe nails. The reason most movies never show this type of mundane activity is because it’s irrelevant to the story. Yet that’s exactly what too many novices do to fill out […]

Here’s the number one mistake novices make in writing a screenplay. They don’t study the craft of screenwriting and storytelling. What too many novices do is learn the basics of writing a screenplay through a book and with the help of screenwriting software, they bang out a screenplay. Although they get the basics of screenplay […]

Way too many writers focus on creating interesting action and fantastic worlds in a science fiction or fantasy setting. The problem is that no great movie can succeed without great characters. Therefore if you want to write a great screenplay, forget about all the fancy eye-candy of special effects and stunts, and just start with […]

Watch any horror movie (even bad ones) and you’ll always notice a common element. Someone always dies. Think about it. What if a horror movie never showed anyone dying? That never happens for two reasons. First, in horror movies, audiences expect to see people dying. Second, and more importantly, the death of a character shows […]