40 years worth of TV writing experience and info, yours for the taking.
Well, that’s what we do here on TVWriter™, right?
Which means this is the right place and time to let everybody know that today, right now, LB’s know-it-all book, Television Writing from the Inside Out is on sale at Amazon for only 99 cents, which is 81% off the list price. This is the Kindle version, but this is also the modern world, gang, so immerse yourselves in the ebook experience.
All right! You wrote it, now what are you going to call it? What’s the perfect title for that script that’ll catch a reader’s eye and maybe put it to the top of the stack? What’s the ‘grab-ya’ title for the book manuscript that will get a reader to pick it up and peruse the story?
Yep, it’s a dilemma, that is.
Let’s start at the beginning. First of all a title is short. Yes, yes, I know there are some that use long titles and are successful – yes, yes, yadda, yadda, right. Now that we’ve gotten past that just because YOU happen to have a long, wonderful title let’s get real. Let’s throw out there four words or less.
This has been an insane week.
It kicked off with an old friend, one of my Bronx homeboys, suddenly and unexpectedly dying. Which, aside from the obvious (grief, funeral, reconnecting with people from back in the day), shifted things for me.
I’m normally a total workaholic. But, I wasn’t in much of a work mood. I cancelled my weekly radio show, so both stations played reruns. I only took a few meetings; ones that couldn’t be rescheduled. Spent a lot of time with his family. And a few days ago, went down to the park handball courts to practice tennis, smash a few balls around and take my mind off of things. Of course, as things turned out, this happened:
by Herbie J PilatoWriters must understand actors, and actors must understand writers. The two professions go hand-in-hand; and the more one knows about the other, the better.
As both a writer and an actor, I’ve established a list of “rules” to which an actor must adhere when performing, which I call, THE THESPIAN TEN COMMANDENTS, which I instructed my students to follow when I was teaching acting back in New York.
For sake of clarity and space, let’s narrow it down to ten, the first five of which we will explore in this post (and the second five in the next post).
by Peggy BechkoThere’s a lot of psychology and emotion that goes into great writing.
Emotion is something we all deal with every day and not all of our emotions are easy to deal with. There are all sorts of ways people use to deal with emotions, to cope with the fall-out and generally claw their way through no matter what.
What’s that got to do with writing? Really, you need to ask?