Tag: online TV writing workshop

“WHAT-IF” PHENOMENA

by David Perlis

“What-Ifs” are big these days. Maybe they always were. What if we had lost WW2? (Man in the High Castle.) What if plummeting fertility rates threatened our society? (The Handmaid’s Tale.) What if 2% of the human population suddenly vanished. (The Leftovers.) One of my professor’s at UCLA lauded the What-If. “That’s your hook,” he’d say. No arguments here. I’m convinced. But I’ve decided there’s a right way and a wrong way to go about it. Here’s the issue: What-If’s are often about building worlds—but drama is about building characters.

Doing it Wrong read article

If You’re a U.S.-Born Poet, This Scholarship is for You

LB’S NOTE: As some of you may know (from clues such as this), I’ve got a soft spot in my heart for poetry. (Notice that I didn’t say that soft spot is in my head, no matter what many people think.)

Because of my love for – and dedication to – poetry, I’m stretching TVWriter™’s mission just a bit by letting all our visitors in on what I believe is a Golden Opportunity…provided that you, like me, not only read poetry but write it too.

Here we go: read article

Cartoon: ‘Uphill’

Grant Snider knows the human soul oh-so-very-well:

To paraphrase Moriarty talking to Sherlock Holmes about his death: “It’s not the fall that kills you…it’s the discouragement.” read article

Troy DeVolld’s Reality TV Pro Tip Grab Bag

by  Troy DeVolld

Hi, all.  Gee whiz, it’s been a while… I feel like a ghost on my own blog.

Thought I’d pop by with a grab bag of pro tips that aren’t long enough for their own features, but that have been hard-won lessons along the way.  Enjoy. read article

Time to Get Your Script in for the Humanitas Prize Competiiton

The Writers Guild of America wants us all to know that “HUMANITAS is pleased to announce a Call for Entries for the 43rd annual HUMANITAS Prize Awards. The winners will be announced at the HUMANITAS Prize Awards held in February 2018.”

Well, not exactly all of us. The Humanitas Prize has been a profoundly important contest over the years, but it has a catch. A production based on the submitted teleplay “must have had a national release on Television (Broadcast, Cable, Internet and Satellite),” and a screenplay must have been released theatrically in the year of the contest, in this case, 2017.

So, yikes!, yeah, to enter you’ve got to be some kind of a pro. While you’re mulling that over, here are the full deets: read article