Audience satisfaction is your job.
Audience satisfaction is about the audience experiencing enough of an emotional journey that they feel like their money, attention, and, above all, their time was worth it.
Story
Do we really need to raise the stakes?
Raising the stakes often misses the point.
What we really want is for the audience to care more deeply about the story’s outcome.
The Concept Is King
This is a concept-driven industry now. For better or for worse. The concept should be unique but just as important: the unique thing should be what generates conceptually unified scenes.
Navigating the Rewrite Process: Finding New Perspectives
There's nothing magical about the rewrite.
It's the same as writing. So don't overcomplicate it, and don't let it intimidate you.
The Magic Why
I want to talk about perhaps our greatest weapon in the creative and emotional battle we call screenwriting.
I happen to think it's our greatest weapon in any endeavor...
It's Never Too Late To Do The Most Important Thing
One of the benefits of being a practitioner and not an academic is that the definitions I’ve sculpted over twenty years of teaching seek less to classify things and more to help us execute them properly.
Don’t start with theme. Let it come to you.
Writers love to talk about theme. Academics, too. It comes up often. A story’s themes can unify and deepen the emotional reaction and those layers can make the work feel “elevated.” For writers and other artists, this is awfully seductive. It really does inflate our self-importance.
This Might Be What’s Wrong With Your Spec Pilot
I’ve been able to read a lot of spec sitcom pilots over the years. Mostly from friends and acquaintances within the Los Angeles improv/comedy scene. The shortcomings of these projects have been surprisingly consistent.