Category: Resources

40 years worth of TV writing experience and info, yours for the taking.

60 Things For Your Characters To Do When They Talk Or Think

One of the things that drives experienced writers and directors and actors and producers crazy is being given scenes that are all about what the characters in them are saying (or thinking) and not about what they’re doing.

Sitting and talking. Standing and talking. Eating and talking. Driving and talking. These are just about the dullest possible things that could be happening in a story, be it on the big screen, the small screen, the even smaller screen, or even in a book.

Fortunately, one of our favorite blogs, South Africa’s Writers Write, has a few suggestions for how to give your characters something to do that will make what they’re saying seem more interesting. Wait, did we say “a few?” Try 60. God, don’t you love it when writers writing about writing write so thoroughly? read article

Peggy Bechko’s World: Your Inner Critic and You

Quiet_Your_Thoughts_BSP

by Peggy Bechko

Everybody and his or her brother can be a critic; is willing to criticize the writing of others…especially if they don’t write themselves, right?

And over time all that criticism from editors, producers, well-meaning friends, critical relatives who just know you’re wasting your time, a reader’s group who though well-meaning, don’t know what they’re talking about, whoever, builds up until it all super-charges the self-critic already camped in your brain. In fact, by now as a writer of scripts and/or books, you might not even be able to tell exactly who or what makes up that tyrant of a self-critic sitting in the bleachers in your brain.

It might do you some good to figure out what the composite actually is, but the main lesson to take away from this is, your writing absolutely must make your audience come back again and again. The audience must look for your name in the credits of a movie. The novel must hook the reader to return to continue reading that book and to look for more with your name on the cover of the next. read article

30 Practical Ways To Beat Writer’s Block

This article doesn’t fool around. It doesn’t settle for giving us a couple of tips, oh, no, no, nooo! Here are thirty – count ’em – thirty ways for all of us to get off our butts, leave our self-pity behind, and $#@! write!

medium_ways_to_beat_writers_block

by Amanda Patterson

Many of us talk about becoming writers, but when we finally have the time and we’re still stuck, will we have what it takes to go beyond the dread writer’s block? Here are 30 tips to help you. Good luck! =&0=& =&1=&:
  1. Handwrite the scene you are working through. Do this for at least one day.
  2. Go to a public place and watch people. Describe what they do and say. Try to find a way to use their body language, and the sights, noises, and odours around you in your own story.
  3. Change the setting in your story. You may want to change it back later, but for the purpose of the exercise, move the characters into another location.
  4. Introduce a new character who watches your main characters. Describe the scene you are writing from that new character’s viewpoint. This should give you a different perspective on the problem.
  5. Use your daily writing prompt to start a scene in your story.
  6. Change the timeline. Make the scene you are busy with an epilogue or a prologue or the beginning or ending of the story.
  7. Ask your character if his or her bucket list has changed since you began writing the story. If it has, rewrite it. If it has not, perhaps it should.
  8. Write from another character’s perspective. If you have been telling the story through the protagonist’s viewpoint, write a scene through the eyes of the antagonist’s sidekick.
  9. Make your character behave out of character. If your heroine is brave, make her back away. What happens when she does this?
  10. Ask your character to list the five things he or she is grateful for right now. If you do not know, you may need to spend more time with your character.
  11. Change tenses. If you’re writing in present tense, switch to past tense and vice versa. Do this for an entire scene. You may find that it gives you ideas for what to leave in and what to exclude.
  12. Research something that interests a character in your story – even if you’re not interested in it. List five things you could use in the story as a result of this research.
  13. Add multimedia to your story. Allow your character to use tweets, emails, and texts to give your story texture.
  14. What if? How can you make things infinitely worse or better for your protagonist at this moment? Is it something you could use?
  15. Stay in the moment. Make sure you won’t be disturbed. Get inside your character’s skin and write the scene moment-by-moment, breath by breath….

Read it all at Writers Write

Productivity for Writers and Other People

Meredith Allard is a successful novelist who actually shares the “secrets” of her success. We at TVWriter™ dig her. You will too:

baby.computer

by Meredith Allard

It’s interesting to me to see how conversations change over time. Not so long ago everyone was praising multi-tasking as the best thing ever. Hey, I can write the world’s greatest novel while reading blogs while checking every new email the moment it pops into my inbox while keeping track of every ping on Facebook and Twitter while walking the dog while doing my taxes while binge watching Netflix while juggling watermelons while yodeling to the tune of “O Solo Mio.” At the end of the day I’d wonder why I hadn’t written more. Had I really lost an entire day watching cat videos on YouTube? Then I realized that I didn’t want to spend more time working. I wanted to get more done.

Around this time, I started seeing articles about how multi-tasking may not be all it was cracked up to be. We weren’t putting all our attention and talent into any one task; as a result, we weren’t working to the best of our abilities because our attention was too scattered. Enter the discussion about productivity. read article

HOW TO WRITE A BESTSELLING NOVEL!

Whoa, a bestseller, stamped and certified. But can you, the writer, really make that happen?
Whoa, a bestseller, stamped and certified. But can you, the writer, really make that happen?

by Robert Gregory Browne

I’ll say this right up front:

The title of this post is complete nonsense

I could have used similar words on the cover of my book on craft to attract those who believe there’s some secret ingredient to bestselling fiction, but I didn’t. read article