Action Lines Why The Action Lines Matter So I did that “passion polish.” I didn’t change any dialogue, I didn’t change the structure, or what happened in scenes. I just polished the action lines. That was it. It took me maybe a few days.
The Business Why I Am Backing The Current WGA Leadership My belief is the WGA is here just for this very purpose. To protect writers when powerful forces try to impose something unethical on us because we are not powerful enough individually to fight back.
Emotion The New Mission of the Screenwriter Our job is this: To create the emotional experience of watching the movie on the screen.
Emotion It’s Not About The Plot Too often, the new writer thinks MORE plot will save them. This is rarely, if ever, true. One of my biggest realizations from breaking down the structure of screenplays was seeing just how simple the plots actually are.
Structure Defining Story Structure You will use structure whether you like it or not. You really have no choice. All you ever do when you are writing is decide what the audience knows and when they know it.
Movies Why Star Wars: The Force Awakens Made Me Feel Terrible This is a movie the studio makes when they really want to reboot a franchise for a younger generation but know the older fans would raze the studio if they did. Charged with that task, I think they did as good of a job as we can reasonably expect.