40 years worth of TV writing experience and info, yours for the taking.
The beauty of telling a story with the written word is that you can always change it. You can improve upon the story if it lacks intrigue, you can make it more exciting, you can crank up the drama or ratchet down the sexiness. Whatever you want to do, you can do. A world of choices is available to you at the click of a keyboard key.
Most importantly — especially for the career-minded screenwriter — you can take this opportunity to fill in the plot holes. According to Wikipedia:
Writing can be fun. Most of the time. Even writing for profit. Or writing for fun like I do here.
And some days, it’s not. You sit down with the best intentions and nothing happens or nothing good. Like this time. I’m in a bad mood, my cats are nagging me, I feel tired and everything I write seems like crap and probably is. However, the column is due and I’d better not go back to Casablancaagain. I told Mike I wouldn’t.
So I’m doing what I usually do. Sit down and type stuff and see if there’s anything useful in it.
Every once in awhile we come across what can best be described as “good, old-fashioned, sound advice. This is one of those times.
Which means you should read it, y’know?
by Rob Pilkington
If you’ve logged even just a couple years in this whole “aspiring screenwriter” thing, you’ve probably discovered that revisiting your old material isn’t always a picnic. Sure, there are lessons to be gleaned from some of those crude, bumbling, early pages, but the spirit of learning is likely trumped by the urge to lock those embarrassing attempts forever inside a fireproof safe – and to drop that safe into some shark-infested waters.
This past weekend you may have noticed that we reprinted/linked to not one but two articles from HollywoodJournal.Com. (Um, that would be HERE and HERE.)
That’s because we just found the site and, well, you know how we are, we fell in love with it. HJC is loaded with articles that we found not only helpful but vastly entertaining. These writers are funny. So funny, in fact, that we wish we could get them to work for us.
Know what we hate more than anything?
Well, maybe not more than anything cuz we really, really, really hate bad writing, slow-paced TV shows, commercials, inconsiderate behavior of all kinds–
Maybe we’d better just stop for now and get back to our main point which is that it has come to our attention that one of the least visited pages on TVWriter™ is our page of favorite television and writing sites. And we find that disturbing cuz we’ve benefitted greatly by having them in our RSS feeds (see, Google, somebody still uses RSS!), and we think you’re missing out by not visiting at least some of these great places too.
