Dr. Ken Atchity: Don’t tell us how great it is, just tell us the story.
Jason Satterlund: I think we all just assume that we’re all geniuses when we start.
Pretty much most of us aren’t. Dr. Ken Atchity: We don’t want to
hear this your first pitch. We don’t want to hear you know you haven’t done this much. We
want to hear that you practice this and that you know exactly what to say. We want to see
if you’ve got the goods and that is the story. Like Mark Twain said Don’t tell us the fat lady
is going to sing. Bring her out, let her sing. Shannan E. Johnson: A lot of times people are
writing screenplays because they’re writing what they’ve seen already because they think
that those are the movie moments that make the film instead of realizing that movie
moment mattered because of who those characters were and what they were trying to get done.
It means absolutely nothing in your screenplay. Jill Chamberlain: Screenwriters are failing
to tell a story, they’re failing to realize that
structure is a way to maximize the impact of their story and that they are ending up presenting
a situation instead of telling a story. Michael Hauge: One of the most difficult
things for writers to really embrace is this idea that at the very foundation of any story
is a visible goal that the hero wants to cross at the end of the story they'll get so caught up in
the inner journey in the depth or dimension of the character or in the themes they want to deliver
or they'll just think the premise is good so they get lost in a thicket of events and plotting
until finally they're just coming up with new ideas and adding idea after idea and it becomes
so complicated and so confusing that there's no story there. Barbara Seymour Giordano: One
of the illnesses of education is they reward the mind and in storytelling it's the heart
and so you want to look at your vehicle as your heart and the steering wheel as your mind right
in story and so I said that wherever we go we need to be in the heart the mind just steers us in the
direction we need to go it should help us navigate it should help us rearrange the the speech or the
script that is the puzzle but it's not there because it's a feeling it's like music if you
don't hit the beats then the audience won't feel it right. William C. Martell: Essentially we're
flawed people and those flaws are going to somehow come out on screen one of the interesting thing
is our story choice always comes from whatever's inside of us so I think it's interesting when I'm
a high concept guy I come up with a bunch of ideas and every idea I come up with
is me and part of the job once I come up with a high concept is to go to trace it back and
go why is that me and once I find why it's me then I can explore that in the script better
than just do the surface version and I think bad high concept movies are just the surface you know
what you know what if he's an alien what if he's whatever and it's like it's the surface story not
the internal story and the internal story is what makes it human and what makes the audience relate
to it. Dr. Ken Atchity: The writer forgetting about the most important part of his story
which is the audience his audience the reader the audience is the most important part of the story
and when you forget it they know the reader knows that you've forgotten them
and then they're they're tuned out they close the book. Erik Bork: But I've done this myself
many times which is write something that is personal to me that I think I felt something
deeply about so audiences will too and one off no one hopes they can pull that off and there are
some pitfalls in that approach that often happen one of them being that we so internalize what we
went through what we were thinking and feeling and why it mattered so much to us in our life
to put it actually on the page in a way that audiences looking at a character based on us
having experiences based on ours for the audience to get those things that are internal to us is
harder than it looks and often just because we felt it deeply doesn't mean that we can write a
character feeling that same thing deeply and the audience will get it sometimes they will
sometimes those are the best movies but a lot of times they won't and a lot of times that thing
that we went through in our personal life that mattered so much to us doesn't necessarily have
the ingredients of an entertaining to watch. Glenn Gers: Story I have a thing I'm trying
to accomplish and that's what story is I have a thing I am trying to accomplish I am a character
and I need to get this thing and it will be a more interesting story if there's something in the way
if I am a character i'm trying to put a suitcase on a train and I go and I put it on the train and
nothing happens it's a very short boring story if they're carrying a suitcase and another person
comes and they steal the suitcase it's more of an interesting story and it's a more interesting
story if that person's got something important in the suitcase if it's just a suitcase they
could say oh somebody stole it oh well I'll go get another one not that strong a story
every story is about a character trying to accomplish something and having an obstacle and
what they do what action they take in the face of the obstacles is your story. Alan Watt: So
many writers think that writing an outline is figuring out the plot okay and and and and it's
there's something very satisfying about coming up with a plot there's something like oh oh i've got
it but here's the problem is that again Einstein says you can't solve a problem at the same level
of consciousness that created the problem every story begins with a dramatic problem and what
happens every writers have this experience you get really excited by your premise and you you start
writing it and you get halfway through and then you get stuck and then you're trying to make these
characters interesting but you feel like they're just you know pieces on a chessboard that you're
trying to move around and and so it's important to understand that story structure is not about
plotting story structure really is the DNA of your protagonist's transformation and so what
you really want to do is you want to start to be curious about your protagonist's dilemma because
when you when you really understand the nature of their struggle the nature of their dilemma
it is going it becomes the source of your story and it starts to it just starts to pay off in
silver dollars it starts to give you all sorts of ideas images scenarios that are going to
um become your plot. Michael Hauge: Not showing the everyday life of the character before they
get into the story moving forward we have to have a setup it can be very brief or a character can be
on the move so to speak action-wise they can have just arrived in a town and we see them
going or they're going to a meeting or going to meet with a hitman or whatever it might be
but nonetheless it has to convey this is who this character has been for some time and it has to
create empathy we'll find out what happened prior to that but the big the first big event that's
going to happen to him doesn't happen on page one we first have to get acquainted and identify
or empathize with this character and that empathy must occur immediately we have to empathize before
we start seeing what the flaws to the character are before we start recognizing what this inner
conflict is or what this identity is or what dark places they might go first we have to just connect
with them emotionally. Jason Satterlund: I had a friend of mine tell me one time that if I ever am
in a position where I have to explain to you what my story is about after you've read the script
then I failed if you should get it from the script if they're not getting it
then that's a problem you need to fix it. Naomi Beaty: I don't understand why she
says this if you have to explain it then you need to rewrite the scene
because you're not gonna what do you sit there when the movie's going in the theater and go
so she's doing it you know that's no that doesn't you've got to fix it one thing that could make
some supporting characters stronger and screenplays in general stronger is connecting
the supporting characters to the theme a little bit more um I think sometimes writers throw in you
know the wacky sidekick or you know a supporting character who's just really colorful and their
first comedic effect or you know a sort of a distraction from the a story but really you want
your screenplay to be a collection of things that are all having the same conversation right so you
want your screenplay to be having one conversation all the way through and all of those pieces should
connect to that conversation they should all fall under that umbrella. Aleem Hossain: Things that
jump to mind when I think about like my particular early mistakes I think one I was a little scared
of trusting my own point of view I think I was relying too much on the models of screenwriting
you know looking at books on the hero's journey and three-act structure and and you know now you
know some of the more involved I was just I was obsessed with those things I was trying to find
an answer in them and at the end of the day like I do think that they have some use but no for me
I realized when I just let go of that and just ask myself like just core emotional and dramatic
questions first of all actually sometimes it would result in stuff that actually had that structure
anyways inherent in it and even when it didn't it still worked. Alan Watt: If you want to imagine
the climax of your story remember that we want our protagonist to be active through the whole
story you want to have an active protagonist and the challenge for writers is that we tend to be
sort of passive observers we're always watching what's going on and so when we sometimes put
ourselves into the protagonist situation sometimes the protagonist can be the least interesting
character in the story and so you want to find a way to make them active. David Jay Willis: Their
lead character has a bunch of people coming at them and doing things you know saying oh you
should do this and he goes okay and he does it it's got if it doesn't come from within
the character then you've got no train you've got no choo choo pulling the train it's not pulling
the story train what you've got is a caboose pushing it that doesn't work okay you need to pull
it and going somewhere. Shannan E. Johnson: A lot of people will write pages and pages and pages of
activity but activity is not action right action is intentional
right people are taking intentional steps towards a goal activity is just anything I went to a party
I sat in my house I watched tv I did x y and z but if that isn't attached to you actually trying to
reach a goal. Geoff Ryan: Then what am I watching monologues oh my goodness I used to write some
obscenely long pretentious monologues as you can probably tell I've very opinionated about things
you know kind of philosophical about things and I would put way too much that into my characters
and it was annoying. Karl Iglesias: First thing you have to understand about dialogue is that
it's got to be connected to the character's desire line in the scene in other words if a character
has an objective an intention in the scene the dialogue has to match that intention and what
I see a lot of times especially with exposition and information is that a character is saying.
All that information and you can tell that it's really the writer's objective in other words the
writer wants to wants the audience to know this information because they think okay the audience
needs to know this and this and this and this so the character is going to say this and this
and that doesn't work because scenes and dialogue are about a character's intention
in the scene everything a character says is matched to what that desire line is
so anything that doesn't belong to that doesn't fit and you can tell whether it's the writer
wanting to know that information wanting the audience to not information whether it's part
of the character Daniel Calvisi: On-the-nose dialogue could be one of the worst. I like to
say sometimes that talking heads dialogue where it's just two characters talking to each other
kind of at each other and then q&a sessions are the worst and that's where one character keeps
asking another questions and then they just keep answering it so it's almost like an interview and
if that goes on for too long it really tires out the reader and it just gets really what we call on
the nose. Christian Elder: Seventy percent of your exposition does not have to go into your script
it can be all in in your cut because all you have to do is like is is set up
a visual cue with an action and then cut to the end result of that action
to the aftermath and just by doing that just by putting one picture here all right
and then putting the end result of that picture right over here you've downloaded your or you've
uploaded your exposition done. Corey Mandell: You know I can relate to this as a writer it was one
of my biggest struggles and I never overcame it and it's part of why I stopped writing
and I see a lot of writers with this struggle if you are so afraid of rejection.
Then it makes you or it can compel you to be the kind of person that you think people want you
to be and this could be true as a son or daughter or a spouse or a writer so you start writing in a
way that you think is what people are looking for and you're scared of writing in a way that could
offend people and so people who are so terrified of rejection can become the kind of person who
it's hard to reject but the person they become is not who they really are so the fear of rejection
can lead people to reject themselves so afraid of being rejected you reject who you truly are.