It’s Valentine’s Day, which means that instead of working your butt off writing your heart out (now there’s a mixed metaphor to be reckoned with!) you’ll probably be making sweet love all day…or being upset because you aren’t.
But tomorrow will come, and with it the siren call of your chosen profession – writing for TV, or films, or even publication. Here’s a Valentine’s Day gift to get your going at en even higher level than you’ve been at so far:
This year’s selection of writerly views of the holiday, the subject of love, and, that most writerly POV of all – ourselves:
And this year’s TVWriter™ fave:
Ken Levine strikes at the very heart of things…yet again!
[It’]s Valentine’s Day and also my birthday…. America celebrates my birthday by jacking up prices at all nice restaurants.
The process of transferring a script to the screen always fascinates us here at TVWriter™, and a new addition to YouTube’s “channels” is right up our alley. For example:
We know this is a writing site, and regular visitors know how much we preach about the importance of the teleplay or screenplay before and during production. And yet, our informal survey of TVWriter™’s minions showed that 9 out of 10 thought that the improvisation on set was what made this film the classic it is. (Well, that we think it is.)
Ever meet a writer without an opinion? Or a great story to tell? Didn’t think so. These very fine writers have very definite opinions…and their stories aren’t too shabby either:
As it turns out, not all screenplays are created equally. Some are written in a matter of weeks, others over the course of years. Some are meticulously researched in advance, others are written spontaneously. Some are completely the product of deep personal introspection, others are offered up for review at cocktail parties. We spoke to the writers whose scripts were nominated for 2019 Academy Awards to learn what different approaches they took that set their current films apart from their previous work.
Usually when I’m writing, I’ll sit in a room with whomever I’m working with and bat it all out. This time, though, Nick Vallelonga and Brian Currie and I got together for two or three weeks to put down how the story should go and what point of view to tell it from. But then I went off to work on a TV show and they went to do a first draft. When they came back a month later, I thought that was too fast, so I took it for about six weeks to write on my own. Then we got back together for a final two or three weeks to argue over whether we needed to add this or that. I also remember vividly another unusual thing: There was one Saturday around 10 p.m., when I’d finished a nice pass on the script. My wife had six or eight friends over, and they were having cocktails and smoking cigarettes. I said, ‘I think I have a draft,’ and they said, ‘Can we look at it?’ They read until about midnight. Then we stayed up till 4 in the morning, with them giving me notes. I still remember people saying, ‘You’re going to get an Oscar nomination for this.’