Rage Against The Page

This model represents the Hero's Journey in four acts. It supplements my old story diamond. Click the image for a larger view. Discussion about the eight plot points is here .

Jeremy Slater just sold his horror screenplay Pet to MGM. Is this the same hilarious (former) neophyte screenwriter and veteran malfeasant Jeremy Slater who dreamed up Rapebear over at How To Write Screenplays, Badly ? I think so. I hope so. Go visit HTWSB and spend an hour trawling the archives. You will laugh lots while learning some lesser-known do-nots of screenwriting. Sadly, it's unlikely we'll see more HTWSB posts from Jeremy and his blogging partner Dan Whitehead. The site has been dormant since about February, 2007. But I suspect Jeremy will launch a new blog someday soon to document his rite of passage into the realm of Hollywood Screenwriter. [ Update: here's Jeremy's new blog .] Congratulations, Jeremy!

Wow. Cue Sting, The Police, and Synchronicity. I was Googling for story structure tips and arrived at this site: Channel101 The first thing to yank my attention on that page was the 4-act circle diagram. That looks identical to my own 4-act Story Diamond . Immediately I knew the author and I were sympatico on 4-act story structure. Dan Harmon, the article's author, has numbered the eight compass points of his circle in clockwise fashion, one through eight. That's opposite to my story diamond, where progression is counter-clockwise. I cannot tell you why I chose counter-clockwise for mine. Maybe it's because I'm in Australia and water spirals down the drain in the opposite direction to you folk in the Northern Hemisphere. (OK, so that is actually an urban legend .) So I knew I was onto something here. Some new piece of the puzzle, I hoped. Or at least further confirmation that others prefer to work with the 4-act structure implicit in the traditional 3-act scr...

So what exactly is going on here...? (click image for larger view) What you're looking at is a Google Trends query on the word "screenplays". And that, my friends, is one heck'uva trend. Google searches on "screenplays" down by almost two thirds in two and a half years? Wow. My immediate, joyful conclusion was, if today there are a third as many novice screenwriters Googling for screenplays online as there were two-to-three years ago, that means my competition just dropped dramatically... right? I mean, budding screenwriters want to download and study produced scripts -- that's a given. So... less people searching for screenplays online = less screenwriters flooding the industry in the next couple of years. Sounds good to me. Now. Is there a negative in there somewhere? If aliens are systematically abducting novice screenwriters these past few years (OK, you explain it!), should I be worried? Does the decline -- whatever the reason behind it -- in fact ...

Julie Gray is an industry script reader. She stands between you and the people with the money (or the contacts) who can make it all happen. So when Julie says, hey, this is what I like in a screenplay and this is what I hate, we listen. If you don't have The Rouge Wave on your RSS feed, add it now. I figured I would spend a little time weeding out the some important tips (IMHO) from her blog and present them here, quoted directly, in handy summary format. Add this checklist to your things-to-do before putting your screenplay out there. From: 20 Things I Know For Sure: Do's and Don'ts in Your Spec Script Do title the script in such a way that it both piques interest and tips the reader off to the nature of the script. Do keep the script down to a nice, tidy 100-ish pages long. Many readers and execs flip to the last page first so we know what we’re up against. The number of pages gives us a sense of your discipline and skill set as a writer; 120 pages of romcom telegraphs ...