Category: Resources

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

Table for One: Cultivating Brilliance

eavesdropping

by Diana Black

Some writers are considered brilliant – born with a ‘creative spoon in their mouth’ – able to craft amazing stories with strong multi-dimensional plots, rich story-worlds and compelling characters lolling about on every fictitious street-corner. Their stories demand our attention from ‘Fade In’ to ‘Fade Out’ but let’s not sell these guys/gals short.

Celebrated writers tend to possess a strong mastery of their craft and able to work damn hard in a disciplined manner. While they may be gifted, they do have a ‘magic feather’….

Other writers, like you and I have to cultivate creative brilliance – and we can! Having a fire in the belly, that turns hours into minutes; with a gripping tale on paper to show for it – that’s often difficult; especially after a long, hard week at a shitty day job. So before we start turning a pale shade of green, or worse, giving up, let’s come up with a way to cultivate brilliance. read article

Unwritten Rules Hollywood Needs to Stop Following

Alas, poor Hollywood. Whether you regard it as a place or state of mind, Hollywood and everything it stands for are just so damned easy to satirize. This article is so on-target that reading it should be mandatory for all new TV scribes:

by Diana Cook

No, dammit. We don't mean that kind of Hollywood. Or that kind of rulez.
No, dammit. We don’t mean that kind of Hollywood. Or that kind of rulez.

Hollywood is notoriously resistant to change. If something was found to be successful in the past, you can guarantee it will be played out over and over again — no matter how tiresome it becomes. For decades now, scriptwriters have relied on the same stock characters, cliches, and structures to produce lazy, formulaic films and shows that do little more than reinforce every negative stereotype about every segment of society imaginable. For example …

#4. Every Husband Is a Bumbling Idiot read article

Peggy Bechko on Overthinking – the Writer’s Plague

overthinking

by Peggy Bechko

Actually overthinking probably is pretty much everyone’s plague – but I’m talking about writers here so that’s where I’ll take this article.

Do you over think, over edit, over tweak everything you write? Yeah, it’s tough, I know. Insecurity, worry, apprehension, am-I-doing-it-right-itis.

We all do it sometime. Writers do it more often. Worry a plot, a scene, a paragraph to death. read article

The Only Rule is Success

Really? Success is a rule and not a goal? A way and not an end? Another mystery of the universe revealed!

success

The Only Rule is Success – 3 Lessons I Learned
by Talece Brown

The Only Rule is Success.

Sounds easy, right? Not always, but it is something you can trust. read article

Working the Nostalgia Thing – Pushing Buttons & Tugging Strings

by Diana Black

Screenwriting 101 classes all across the country stipulate, “For the suits to buy your script (the product), it must be brilliantly crafted. They (not just you) must perceive it to be a highly marketable concept entailing a great story with astonishing characters.”

In order to receive such high praise from these folk, who are renowned to have a serious, ‘hard core’ exterior, we need to emotionally ‘move’ them. As in blubbing like babies. After all, we may be highly sensitive and committed artists, but this is a business – for us and the suits. Everyone’s ass is on the line. But if every aspiring writer delivers what we know the suits want, all that does is keep us in the pack, not ahead of it.

So let’s explore possible ways to get ahead with the objective being to generate deep, almost imperceptible emotional responses to our masterpiece. A knowledge and understanding of how to generate nostalgia in subtle and profound ways may be a useful skill component in one’s kit-bag. read article