What goes into writing a great movie script?
Last Updated: 30.06.2025 02:09
Leave holes. Write and unwrite. Put it in, take it out.
Use status to help drive conflict. King Lear/fool. Upstairs/downstairs.
Maintain a slush pile/idea file. When you are ready to write, choose the best seeds to plant.
Study Reveals Plague's Evolutionary Hack to Survive 3 Pandemics - ScienceAlert
Your primary job is to create situations. Modern actors will fuck up your dialogue, despite whatever your contract says.
Conflict is your power source; without it you have no drama and hence no script.
All rules are made to be broken, but you damn well better know WHY you’re breaking them.
Ray-Ban Meta vs Oakley Meta: The Ultimate Smart Glasses Showdown of 2025 - Yanko Design
The DSM 5 is a wonderful character compendium.
Get up there yourself. Be in a movie. Take some acting (not writing) classes. Learn how a trained actor approaches a text. Learn why actors take roles. They do as much if not more than the writer does.
Primary characters must change polarities. Secondary characters can change less.
Don't Like The New Xbox Game Hubs? Here's How To Turn Them Off - Pure Xbox
Make sure to pack enough explosives into the rocket.
Cut everything that is not a payoff, or a setup for a specific payoff. “Omit needless words.” Think about the sparseness of joke telling, or Grimm Brothers.
What you leave unwritten is as important as what you write. SUBTEXT.
NBA 2K26 Summer League 2025 tips off July 10 in Las Vegas - NBA
Audiences are smarter than you think. Something about turning down the house lights makes their IQs go up.
Only God gets it right the first time. Rewrite everything.
Write in reverse time. Major characters need to change polarity; minor characters may remain the same at the end.
Outline everything. Use story beats. Keep character’s mouths taped up, until they absolutely MUST speak. Write the script and the dialogue at the last minute, after you’ve revised the hell out of the outline.
Research the facts and then throw away the research.
To develop a unique voice for each character, try interviewing your characters.
Fatty liver: Symptoms and warning signs seen during the night - Times of India
Actors give better feedback than writers do.
Learn to tell a story orally and not through writing. Try telling your story to a friend.
A scene should change valence from beginning to end. Up to down, down to up.
Oxford study finds 'extraordinary' tremors caused by tsunamis - BBC
A critical function of storytelling is wish fulfillment. This is why video games are so popular. “That protagonist is JUST LIKE ME.”
Don’t direct from the page. Everyone, from the director on down, wants to be part of the process of making movies. Let them do their work.
People choose what to see based on the high concept. Make sure to deliver an ending consistent with the high concept -- it is what the audience paid for.