In every story, there’s a dilemma. If the hero succeeds, they’ll achieve a goal but if they fail, they’ll risk wrecking their lives somehow. In “Top Gun: Maverick,” there’s a scene where the hero explains the mission the Top Gun pilots must achieve. In this mission, the dangers are enemy anti-aircraft missiles and 5th generation […]
Most writers write boring scenes where nothing happens. If they do write a scene where something happens, it’s nothing memorable. So if you want to write a memorable scene, start with contrasts. The key is to begin each scene where two opposing characters are in opposite states. Then by the end of the scene, the […]
Write great scenes and you’ll write a great screenplay. Write boring scenes and you’ll never write a great screenplay. What makes a scene boring is when it’s predictable, so to keep a scene from being too predictable, you must define two things: Watch this scene from “The Pursuit of Happyness” where Will Smith plays a […]
When most people get an idea for a story, they rush to write the screenplay. This usually lasts for 20 pages or so before the writer runs out of ideas and winds up with a complete mess of a screenplay that will have to be heavily edited to salvage it. Here’s a better way to […]
Far too many novices write screenplays that consist of scenes that serve one purpose and then get discarded and forgotten. The key to writing scenes, especially early in the story, is to make scenes foreshadow the ending. In “Top Gun: Maverick,” there’s an early training scene where Maverick is trying to shoot down a plane […]
Novices tend to write scenes that have no connection or relation to any other scene. That makes every scene feel completely separate and isolated from every other scene so the entire story feels disjointed and unfocused. The way to fix this problem is to always foreshadow future scenes in every scene possible. In “Pulp Fiction,” […]
In action films, it’s easy to see two people physically fighting each other to achieve a goal where only one can win. When you watch a physical battle, you can see how the momentum shifts from the hero to the villain and back again. Initially, the hero seems to be winning, then the villain takes […]
Scenes represent the building blocks of every story so if you have a dull scene, you’ll have a dull story. That’s why you must make every scene as interesting as possible or else you’ll wind up with a handful of great scenes surrounded by much more numerous mediocre scenes, and that will simply kill even […]