A blog about screenwriting and things that are useful for screenwriters.
Inneresting
Sometimes writers struggle to name their characters. This week's Inneresting collects some ideas that might make the job easier (from a certain point of view).
Looking for an example of characters surviving horrific monsters through making good choices? Attack the Block offers up an example.
Inneresting
Your audience deserves a better class of horror victim. How do we write smarter characters that can still find themselves on the business end of a machete?
Scriptnotes Recap
David E. Kelley likes a courtroom. Who can blame him? He went to law school, his first writing job was on LA Law, and he created (among twenty other legendary TV series) The Practice, Boston Legal, Harry's Law, Presumed Innocent, The Lincoln Lawyer, and Ally McBeal. Even when
At what point does a monster become frightening for what they do instead of what they represent? Can writers find sympathy in a slasher?
Inneresting
Don't reach for that pitchfork! We're talking about writing sympathetic monsters, and how offending the delicate sensibilities of a community is enough to set off an angry mob.
Scriptnotes Recap
In Hollywood, when one of your best friends works on a movie, you're gonna hear about it a lot. You get all the details, from their excitement when it gets the green light, venting through the craziness of production, and surviving the carnival of releasing it out into
Inneresting
What does it feel like to live in a dystopia? What's the street level view of this broken society you're writing a story in? We have examples to talk about in this week's Inneresting.
Scriptnotes Recap
It's like Hemingway said: "Boys, Shakespeare got there first and better, so relax and start writing."
Useful Things for Writers
The screenplay format is exacting and regimented. It can intimidate new writers and old pros alike because at some point all of your wonderful ideas need to be transformed into sluglines and action lines and dialogue. But, before you start worrying about translating all of your ideas into screenplay format,
In some stories the future isn't bright, but you gotta wear mirrored shades. We're talking dystopian storytelling and the discomfort of when far-flung futures start to feel all too real.
A character's transformation within a story takes time. It's the accumulation of many moments over time, layering and building on each other. Ideally those moments mesh with other parts of the story already in play. As the character navigates the challenges in front of them, they
A look into the psyche of our readership, collecting the most popular links from the last three months of Inneresting!
Yes yes, Ali Barthwell is insanely funny and has talent bursting out of her eyeballs, but the thing I want to celebrate her for the most is how she's built her career. Living in LA, you always hear stories about the creatives who live in other places. People
The standard screenplay font is 12-point Courier – or any close variant like Courier Prime, Courier New, or Courier Final Draft. This has been the industry standard since the era of mechanical typewriters, and it remains the rule today for a straightforward reason: Courier is a fixed-pitch font, meaning
For our 300th issue, we're feeling the fear and writing about it anyway. We're looking at examples of the moment a character realizes that they're in trouble.
Bronson Watermarker Pro is not just a new version. It’s a brand-new app focused exclusively on protecting your documents.
Sometimes it falls on the writer to make two people sitting and talking a dynamic scene that pulls the audience in. We look at one such scene from Star Trek to find some potential writing strategies.
How big does a story need to be? Inneresting asks the big questions about story scale this week.
Why is this the newsletter topic for this week? Why do we think we're the ones to write about it for you? Find out in this week's Inneresting!
I love Widow's Bay so thoroughly, so fiercely, that it strangely makes it difficult to write about. If you're reading this, you've either: Not seen the show, in which case my enthusiasm would be so intense it might put you off actually watching it,
