The Nicholl Fellowships annual screenwriting contest, has as many as six thousand scripts submitted each year. About 50 readers review and grade them, with only 5% making it to the quarterfinal stage. Ten scripts make it to the finals. A committee then selects five scripts which are awarded scholarships. (more…)
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. (more…)
(a) “The word screenwriting is a kenning, which means it’s a composite of two nouns… Everybody focuses on the screen part, because it’s Hollywood and it’s fun and it’s money and it’s fame… (more…)
Last evening those of us who have been aficionados of Saturday Night Live, either limitedly through the myriad casts, or like myself more or less continually from the beginning, had an opportunity to revisit its history over a three and one-half hour broadcast marathon. (more…)
As noted in part one of ‘Tips for Rewriting’ (of course, subject itself to a degree of rewriting), depending on how close one is to the project submission deadline, the rewriting emphasis shifts from bigger picture revision to more fine-tuning. (more…)
One did not have to be a screenwriter to see how participating in a teleconference session such as I did today helps one’s overall writing skills, since clearly there are overlapping principles which benefit you in almost any type of written communication. (more…)
The human brain is a curious instrument. It is remarkably like the sea, possessing deeps and shallows – cold dark profundities and sunny crests. It has its breakers dashing in to shore, and its sullen backwashes. Swift currents race beneath a surface ruffled by minor winds. And there a constant pulsing rhythm in it very like the tides. For it possesses periods of ebb, when all inspiration recedes into the blind plumy distance; and periods of flow, when strong thoughts come hurtling in, resistless and supreme.
From The Chinese Orange Mystery Ellery Queen (orig. published 1934)
the watch of time 
Memorable Quotes: Tales of Screenwriters – Part Four
The Marketplace – the writer and self:
(a) “When you look at someone else’s films and say, ‘I can do that’, you’re in a lot of competition – because everyone else is looking at that hit of the year and they’re saying, ‘I can do that’ too. You’re gonna be up against all of them… But if you look into yourself and say, ‘What do I have that no one else has, but other people can understand and identify with,’ then you’re only in competition with yourself.” (more…)
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