A blog about screenwriting and things that are useful for screenwriters.
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."
Resources
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,
Inneresting
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
Inneresting
A look into the psyche of our readership, collecting the most popular links from the last three months of Inneresting!
Scriptnotes Recap
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
Resources
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
Inneresting
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.
Useful Things for Writers
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,
In screenplay scene headings, INT. and EXT. stand for interior and exterior, respectively. You use INT. when the scene takes place inside a location and EXT. when it occurs outside.
This week's newsletter explores how active listening skills are part of what differentiates intersecting monologues from an Inneresting conversation.
In the heat of the moment, characters are allowed to not know what to say. This week's Inneresting covers how stress and emotion change how we speak.
True confessions: I saw Sorry, Baby three times. First time was because I got a screener for Scriptnotes and loved it, the second time was when it came out in theaters I had to show my wife the movie I wouldn't stop talking about, and then I took
A difficult choice isn't automatically a dilemma, so this week's Inneresting looks at how time pressure raises the stakes and forces character action.
Ideas for how to use in-universe broadcasts to have fun with exposition!
What happens when you show how much opposing characters have in common? How can "two sides of the same coin" add depth to a story?
