Rage Against The Page

Murdered Minister's Wife Confesses to the Crime ... was the headline that caught my eye and had me clicking through to shortnews.com . I really wanted to know how the deceased wife of a minister managed to confess to murdering herself. It sounded like some kind of delicious time-travel scenario, or perhaps a ghostly confession from the spirit world. I mean, are we talking about a cryptic suicide? Did she have multiple personalities and go through a sudden and awful Jekyll-Hide struggle while chopping carrots for the evening meal? No. The wife is safe and well. And headed for jail. You guessed it: she was the one doing the murdering and her minister husband was the one doing the expiring. But that's not what the title says. The title is horribly ambiguous. Both readings are valid: that the victim was the minister or that the victim was his wife. Now, ambiguity is a wonderful tool for writing comedies. Audiences love to be fooled by clever use of language (so long as you don...

Just a quick note about an interesting confluence of blogging about structure. Inevitably this type of thing comes and goes, especially with such a lively topic of debate as screenwriting structure. First, Craig Mazan at The Artful Writer threw down the glove with his article Q: How Strict Should I Be With Act Breaks? A: Not Very . Two days later, Phil Morton of ScreenwriterBones fame picked up the glove, dusted it off, and torched it with an arc welder. Phil's article is called On Structure . Polite as they are, you could not get two more opposing opinions. Clearly I'm in the Morton camp, as evidenced by my 4-Act Story Diamond post , and I'm glad to see Phil stand up to Craig's hogwash (albeit coincidentally) on this issue. Craig is a dedicated writer, and a passionate Guild rep, but telling novice writers this (about Act breaks) is misleading at best and downright professional sabotage at worst: Hooey. Baloney. Argle-bargle. Go ahead…fill in your own Montgomery Burns...