the watch of time

Memorable Quotes: Tales of Screenwriters – Part Five

The Marketplace – selling stories:

(a) “I had no idea that selling oneself was going to be such a huge part of the process, and that your ability to write is secondary only to your ability to walk in to a room and present your idea…  a script is already a description of a thing.  It’s a description of a movie. So to be describing the description of a thing…  But that’s how you get the job.” (more…)

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…)

Memorable Quotes: Tales of Screenwriters – Part Three

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…)

Memorable Quotes: Tales of Screenwriters – Part Two

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…)

Memorable Quotes: Tales of Screenwriters – Part One

(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…)

Tips for Rewriting – Part Two

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…)

Tips for Rewriting – Part One

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…)