Said person being Paul Haggis, of CRASH, MILLION DOLLAR BABY, and TV shows like DUE SOUTH and WALKER, TEXAS RANGER. Haggis knows his stuff, so all we can add here is: “Listen up!”
Category: Resources
40 years worth of TV writing experience and info, yours for the taking.
Peggy Bechko: Writers Thinking About Settings
by Peggy Bechko
If you don’t think much about it and just sort of throw settings in as you need there, just for color and background, then maybe you need to pause and think about that again….
Okay, done thinking? Hope you’ve come to some good conclusions, namely just how important settings can be to novel or script. In fact, setting can become so central to a story that it’s almost another character. Think about it – Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Martian series – he created his own Mars. Settings and characters to go with it. There were precise and detailed settings full of color and life on their own. And when the movie was made all that detail became real on the screen. And, the director didn’t need to have pages and pages of written instruction to get there.
He also didn’t need a lot of those pages when he has at his fingertips the ability to project lots and lots of images for the ‘reader/watcher’ to absorb.
Give Everything You Write the Best Possible Title
…Cuz it’s all about bringing the suckers readers and viewers in, right?
Right:
by Rita Karnopp
One of my favorite things to do is give my book a title. Most times I’ll give it a ‘working title’ because I know the ‘true title’ will reveal itself while writing the book.
Peggy Bechko: Life’s Disasters, a Writers POV
by Peggy Bechko
I sat myself down to write a blog post and I said to myself, “Self, what to write about?”
Then I knew. The leak in the roof. Yes, indeed, living in a flat-roofed house can be challenging. It’s raining. There’s a leak. There’s also a big bubble in the ceiling I had to pierce to let the water out – and more rain is predicted and the roof guy is, well, busy.
So now you’re reading this and you’re saying to yourself what the heck does a leak in the roof, no matter how challenging, have to do with writing?
How DUNGEONS & DRAGONS has Influenced a Generation of Writers
Are we just glorified dungeon masters? Or are dungeon masters just glorified writers? The New York Times has a cool view on the subject:
A Game as Literary Tutorial
by Ethan Gilsdorf
When he was an immigrant boy growing up in New Jersey, the writer Junot Díaz said he felt marginalized. But that feeling was dispelled somewhat in 1981 when he was in sixth grade. He and his buddies, adventuring pals with roots in distant realms — Egypt, Ireland, Cuba and the Dominican Republic — became “totally sucked in,” he said, by a “completely radical concept: role-playing,” in the form of Dungeons & Dragons.
Playing D&D and spinning tales of heroic quests, “we welfare kids could travel,” Mr. Díaz, 45, said in an email interview, “have adventures, succeed, be powerful, triumph, fail and be in ways that would have been impossible in the larger real world.”