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Story Trick: Foreshadowing and Payoff in The Prestige
You want to write a story? Fine. Put away your dictionary, your encyclopedias, your World Almanac, and your thesaurus. Better yet, throw your thesaurus into the wastebasket. The only things creepier than a thesaurus are those little paperbacks college students too lazy to read the assigned novels buy around exam time. Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule. You think you might have misspelled a word? O.K., so here is your choice: either look it up in the dictionary, thereby making sure you have it right – and breaking your train of thought and the writer’s trance in the bargain – or just spell it phonetically and correct it later. Why not? Did you think it was going to go somewhere? And if you need to know the largest city in Brazil and you find you don’t have it in your head, why not write in Miami, or Cleveland? You can check it … but later. When you sit down to write, write. Don’t do anything else except go to the bathroom, and only do that if it absolutely cannot be put off.
[via Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully - in Ten Minutes, by Stephen King]
As mentioned I’ve bought Movie Magic Screenwriter, and uh man is that as sweet program.
It’s way above all the other screenwriting programs I’ve tried (yes, all of them, I looking at you Final Draft).
The included outlining feature is really really nice, as in super nice. And on top of that you can customize almost anything in the program you can dream of.
I know that the program doesn’t make the writer, but this program just takes the hassle out of writing, and really lets you consentrate on imagining stuff instead.
Eight rules for writing fiction:
- Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
- Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
- Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
- Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
- Start as close to the end as possible.
- Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
- Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
- Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
[via troubling.info]
I have just finished the first draft of my first screenplay.
Yes, I am indeed very proud of myself. It is very satisfying to finally to write FADE OUT. THE END.
It has been a rather long process and it have taking me around 8 weeks to write the 49 pages that the script ended up on. But I take it as much as a learning experience and it has never been the aim to produce a full-length script in the first try.
This last week or two, I have had some serious writer’s block and I tried many different approaches to battle this. The only one that seems to be working is; writing. Just writing. Writing crap and then some more crap. It is extremely difficult, but I really found that writing is the only medicine. It actually helped me to read the crap I have written and then say “man that’s bad. I can do a lot better than that!” It might sound strange but this last day I wrote almost 10 pages in one sitting and I believe that was only possible because I have kept writing the whole time.
Another great tip I found very useful was Hemmingway’s (at least I think it was Hemmingway) way of ending your day of writing in the middle of a sentence or a scene. You do it even though you know perfectly well how it ends. That way when you sit down that the computer or typewriter the next day you know what to write. You just finish that sentence or that scene and then continue. That way you always “hit the ground running” and never have to face the dreaded Blank Page.
Oh, the story. Yes, I am getting a bit ahead of myself here. It is actually an adaptation of one of Bram Stoker’s short stories called The Judge’s House. It is a 12-page (give or take) short story and I have taken many liberties with the source material. It started out as being very close to the original. The outline process also produced a script that was very close to Stoker’s original text, but as the writing progressed, I took more and more liberties with the story. Both because I have moved the story to present day but also because there are many fundamental differences between a short story and a screenplay. I have introduced some other characters and removed others. Overall, it, at least in my view, plays better as a screenplay this way.
I will not publish the screenplay yet, as I fell that it clearly needs at least one or two thorough rewrites before anyone else than myself will be able to understand and appreciate the story. There are many scenes that I am very proud of and a lot of the dialog that is very good, but there are most certainly also some that is very close to the worst writing I have ever produced.
The next draft of the script will also be more in the agreed length of a feature film: 90-120 pages.
I have use the great open source editor Celtx to write the script. However, even though it is great, and free, it has some bugs and missing features that are rather annoying. And in one of my attempts to battle the before mentioned writer’s block I downloaded a trial version of Movie Magic Screenwriter and was very impressed. Therefore, I promised myself that when I finished this first draft I would shell out for the full version as a reward.