40 years worth of TV writing experience and info, yours for the taking.
Our friends at Script Reader Pro come through once again with this common sense guide to writing a good scene:
Writing a scene — one that moves the reader — can be a challenge. But there’s one technique you should include in every scene you write.
Lindsay Ellis is an American video essayist and film critic with degrees in film from NYU and USC. She condenses complex critical thinking and academic theory into entertaining and humorous YouTube essays on everything from a Film Studies through the Lens of Transformers to Product Placement and Fair Use. She is also the host and writer for PBS’s online short series It’s Lit! You can check out all of her content for free on YouTube!
Video essays. What are they and what are their strengths as opposed to written essays?
Ever notice how much clearer so many Industry pros are when they tell you what they don’t want than what they do? The fact is, that knowing what won’t work for you as a writer may well be even more important than knowing what does, which makes the following article worth its weight in gold:
Don’t know what to write? It can be difficult to understand what the industry wants, so sometimes it’s easier to work out what they DON’T want!
NOTE FROM LB: Exhausted human beings that we at TVWriter™ are, we were vacationing (in my case lying in bed trying to catch up on some of the sleep I lost for a variety of reasons last year) Christmas week and missed the chance to publish John’s Christmas column at the appropriate time. Here it is now, in all its nostalgic glory. Thanks, John, for making me smile:
“There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,” returned the nephew. “Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!”
Because Doonesbury just happens to be one of the most influential comic scripts of all time, and its creator, Garry Trudeau, has moved on to TV, and we’re interested as hell in just about anything this dude says: