It’s never enough to focus on your story’s plot and action. Just look at the string of failures like “The Crow” remake, “Borderlands”, or even “Furiosa” to see that action is never enough to tell a compelling story. What makes a story great is how it changes your hero. In the short story “Contents of a […]

The best stories show the hero changing. The more drastic the change, the more emotional the experience. A hero who changes from a loser to a winner (think “Rocky”) is far more interesting than a hero who changes from a winner to a bigger winner. Eliminate change in the hero and you literally don’t have […]

Nearly every writer starts a story at the beginning and works their way to the end. The problem with this approach is that you often don’t know the ending well. If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll likely write lots of meaningless scenes and dialogue that don’t support the ending (because it’s not clear […]

Everyone has an idea for a screenplay (especially in Los Angeles). The problem is that ideas are easy but turning an idea into a full-length, formatted screenplay is hard. So the answer is simple. Don’t waste time writing full-length, properly formatted screenplays. If you want to sell a screenplay, you’ll eventually have to write a […]

Everyone wants to write a great story, but far too many writers are simply hoping and praying their idea will somehow magically work out. When you rely on hope as a strategy, you’ve already failed. If you want to write a great story, start by identifying the three key parts that make up every great […]

What makes a great story? It’s not more action, A-list actors, or more realistic special effects. What makes a great story is watching a hero forced into making tough decisions. That’s it. Nobody will mistake a movie like “Legally Blonde” with an action movie like “Die Hard.” Yet both movies force their heroes to change. […]

If you’ve ever seen a fractal, it’s a geometric pattern that endless repeats itself. This creates beauty, harmony, and art, which is exactly what you want to create when you create a story. In storytelling, you have your big story (what’s it about?) Then you have individual Acts and within those Acts, you have individual […]

Here’s how most novices write a scene. They try to describe a scene as realistic as possible. The end result is a scene that’s boring because reality is boring. So the number one reason why most scenes don’t work is because the writer tries to describe reality. To fix this problem, don’t try to make […]

Many writers have an idea for a story but often no clear idea how to start or end it. If that describes your dilemma, stop right there. Before you can create a story, you absolutely must know how it begins and how it ends. You don’t have to know all the gritty details, but you […]

One mistake many people make is they try to turn an event from their own lives into a screenplay. This typically means the writer obsesses over telling their life story rather than developing screenwriting skills. Even worse, they rarely stop to think if their life event would be interesting to anyone in the first place. […]