A blog about screenwriting and things that are useful for screenwriters.
Inneresting
Have you found your story's guiding star? How do you know if you've latched on to something that will keep you writing to the end?
Villaintine's Month continues with a closer look at Amadeus, and how a villain like Salieri can make an excellent protagonist (without losing the villainy).
Featured Friday
Weekend Read, our app for reading scripts on your phone, features a new curated collection of screenplays each week. This week, we celebrate relationships showing up in ways that the characters or the audience might not expect. We have humans in love with someone not-quite human, love between two non-humans,
Inneresting
If there's one thing the internet has done for the general public's savviness with entertainment, it's bombard them with clickbait-sized helpings of trope education. But if there are two things, that second one is increasing how much we talk about what we watch, read
Inneresting
This month we're looking at pairings of heroes and villains that have more chemistry than some romantic couples. What does it mean to be an archnemesis?
Resources
Writer credits are complicated, and unpacking them for any particular project may be an impossible task without talking directly to those involved.
Featured Friday
Weekend Read, our app for reading scripts on your phone, features a new curated collection of screenplays each week. This week, we travel through the fourth dimension with some of our favorite time travel stories. Our collection includes: * 11.22.63 - “The Rabbit Hole” by Bridget Carpenter * Avengers: Endgame
Featured Friday
Weekend Read, our app for reading scripts on your phone, features a new curated collection of screenplays each week. This week, we’re dropping you into the wilderness with some of our favorite survival thrillers. If you read Hatchet in middle school and thought, “I could do better than that
Resources
John tackles a difficult question for writers who wonder how long is too long to keep trying.
Useful Things for Writers
Weekend Read, our app for reading scripts on your phone, features a new curated collection of screenplays each week. This week, we settle into January with some of our favorite dramas set during these long, cold winter months. Real talk, when I scheduled this I was hoping the Heated Rivalry
John surveyed current and former TV assistants to create a document that is both specific to the world of television and also can broadly apply as a template for how to be a better boss.
This week, we celebrate the best part of awards season – the FYC screenplays released as part of Oscar campaigns!
John talks about knowing what medium would best suite the story you're trying to tell.
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.
Thanks for joining us again for the start of another Inneresting year! Even though a new year is a somewhat arbitrary place to make a fresh start, it's a good time to take stock. What have you been doing? What are you doing? What do you want to
Weekend Read, our app for reading scripts on your phone, features a new curated collection of screenplays each week. This week, we're pulling from our proposed film studies syllabus to focus on larger than life storytelling. These stories ask big questions about what makes a hero, and peel
Colored pages are used in film and television to keep track of revisions to a script as it goes into production.
One easy way to show one character interrupting another is to use double-dashes or an ellipsis to indicate the first character’s dialogue is being interrupted.
V.O. (voice over) and O.S. (off-screen) are similar terms, but they have slightly different applications.
"I can't believe you haven't seen (x)!" In Scriptnotes episode 713, Danya Jimenez & Hannah McMechan talked briefly with John about how one element of film school is how it forces you to watch a lot of things you wouldn't necessarily seek
Weekend Read, our app for reading scripts on your phone, features a new curated collection of screenplays each week. This week, we remember Rob Reiner. Reiner brought the words of writers like Norah Ephron, William Goldman, Aaron Sorkin, and Stephen King to the screen, creating multiple modern day classics. Our
