40 years worth of TV writing experience and info, yours for the taking.
Nathan Bransford, TVWriter™’s favorite publishing know-it-all, responds to a question we’ve all been asked…almost as much as we ask it ourselves. (Bet you’ve already guessed what it is.)
Nearly every author I work with asks me a variation of the same question.
“Is this any good?”
Plot twists can make or break a film or TV episode. Which means it behooves us all to learn how to do them. This video is a big straightforward step in the right direction.
Nathan Bransford, TVWriter™’s favorite publishing know-it-all, has important advice on something all er writers hate and fear yet find ourselves doing anyway: The Beelzebubian torture also known as query letter writing.
SUBJECT LINE: Query – [Something that makes sense like your book title]
Aaron Sorkin thrills and disappoints us. OMG! This must mean he’s human!
Actually, we were pretty disappointed by the Wired Mag video too. All that pre-roll advertising! Sheesh!
TV and film writers sometimes forget that we aren’t the only ones who write draft after draft in our quest for perfection (as opposed to when we write draft after draft to ruin what we’ve written so a stubborn, unappreciative producer will pay our fee). Even the best novelists do the same thing. Studying the various drafts is one of the best ways to learn the craft. Cases in point:
Writers who find themselves mired in procrastination would do well to take a page from Marcel Proust’s most famous book. Specifically, a page from In Search of Lost Time in manuscript form. Nothing more powerfully illustrates the truth of that creative-writing-class maxim, ‘writing is rewriting’, than the liberally crossed-out, lavishly annotated, occasionally doodled-upon notebooks in which Proust composed his seminal, seven-volume text.