the watch of time

The Educator’s Perspective:

“You can watch a film just for fun, and then you can watch it again and start breaking it down with the timer on your DVD player to see what kinds of things happen at certain times and to look for patterns. You can get a simple book, like one of those Syd Field books, and see if things are actually falling on these different structural places. But it’s a dangerous thing too, because I find that a lot of people wrote great screenplays without having to know all of these structural paradigms, so you want to balance that with still enjoying film and writing from your heart.

…read a screenplay a week – hopefully great ones… There’s rhythm, there’s the way things look on a page.  Not just formatting… So many people seem to need focus and discipline.  The ‘voice’ part of screenwriting can’t be taught…

There are a lot of perfectionists out there who kinda circle around and research and read books and study – and they never really finish screenplays.

You need to learn it’s more about the journey than the destination… there’s a difference between doing and being.  When you venture forth to do screenwriting, like many people do, then the moment you stop, you’re not a screenwriter.  But if you move toward the idea of being a writer, then it never leaves you.  And I think that’s a higher thing to aspire to – to be a writer. You keep writing not necessarily to write a script or to get a movie made, but because that is who you are.

People who already have a high level of interest in the subject…  It’s not something they do, but it’s something they are.”

                                                                            Excerpted quotes from Kris Young                                                                                 Tales from the Script (2010)