Rage Against The Page

Writing is death. Writing robs you of life.  It literally sucks the life from you.  It's a fat, slurping, pulsing leech hooked into your jugular day and night.  Every hour spent hunched on a chair at the keyboard shortens your lifespan.  Studies prove it.  Sitting for long periods wrecks your circulation, raises cholesterol, and shortens your lifespan.  Five years, ten years -- your love of writing will surely punch your ticket way sooner than designed. Writing is killing you just as surely as smoking, drinking, or parking yourself on the couch for hours and hours a day. Writing means ignoring the real world.  Writing disconnects you from reality.  It's a solitary exercise, a long journey into oneself.  The trip commences when you enter a cold black tunnel.  You wait for the light to return but, after many miles, you finally realize this tunnel never ends. Writing dissolves friendships and strangles new ones, because a writer mus...

"Audiences don't care about accomplishments.  What they care about is the moment afterwards when the accomplishment is shared with the person the hero loves."

... that's the story I'm working on right now. I'd read much about Capra's beloved IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, but I hadn't seen it.  Before I remedied that, I grabbed a copy of the script (transcribed; if you have a scanned copy, please email me!) — written by Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, Frank Capra, and Jo Swerling — and did a page breakdown. I work in four acts, being your traditional three-act structure split equally into quarters.  Feel free to lump my Act Two and Act Three into a single Act Two, if that's your model. The [F] indicates the protagonist's rising or falling fortune at the end of the scene.  Take note how the writers ping-pong George's fortunes during the first half of the story — fortune smiles upon him here and frowns on him there — then they carve out a precipitous, continuous drop in George's fortunes from around page 105 onward, until things finally bottom out at the Climax and his fortunes rapidly ascend during the ...

For a long time I held aloft, above all others, Michael Hauge's one-word answer to the question:  What makes a screenplay work? EMOTION . On the first page of  Writing Screenplays That Sell , Michael explains: People do not go to the movies so they can see the characters on the screen laugh, cry, get frightened, or get turned on.  They go to have those experiences themselves.The reason that movies hold such a fascination for us, the reason the art form has been engrossing and involving audiences for close to a century, is because it provides an opportunity to experience emotion. ... All filmmakers, therefore, have a single goal: to elicit emotion in an audience. That was then; this is now. Now, I understand there's something loftier.  Something more seminal.  It was there all along.  I just never bothered to follow the breadcrumbs all the way to the source. It's true: eliciting emotion in your audience makes a screenplay work. So, how do you c...

In every step of the production of your animation, the story, the design, the staging, the animation, the editing, the lighting, the sound, etc., ask yourself why? Why is this here? Does it further the story? Does it support the whole? To create successful animation, you must understand why an object moves before you can figure out how it should move. Character animation isn’t the fact that an object looks like a character or has a face or hands. Character animation is when an object moves like it is alive, when it looks like it is thinking and all of its movements are generated by its own thought process. It is the change of shape that shows that a character is thinking. It is the thinking that gives the illusion of life. It is the life that gives meaning to the expression. 3 As Saint-Exupéry wrote, “It’s not the eyes, but the glance - not the lips, but the smile...”  Every single movement of your character should be there for a purpose, to support the story and the persona...

INTRODUCTION: In February 2012, Andrew Stanton presented his now familiar story talk at the TED Conferences forum.  Once again, Andrew drives home the keystones of great storytelling. This time we learn about a deeply personal story connection between Andrew's birth and Finding Nemo . READABILITY TIP:  For easier reading and to prevent eye strain, narrow the width of your browser tab to reflow the text into shorter lines. I recommend a words-per-line count of 12 to 15. A tourist is backpacking through the highlands of Scotland, and he stops at a pub to get a drink. And the only people in there is a bartender and an old man nursing a beer. And he orders a pint, and they sit in silence for a while. And suddenly the old man turns to him and goes, "You see this bar? I built this bar with my bare hands from the finest wood in the county. Gave it more love and care than my own child. But do they call me MacGregor the bar builder? No." P...

I need a roadmap.  I'm not disciplined enough to stick to a simple, clean through-line when I'm storycrafting.  I need an unflappable navigation system to steer me true north.  So over the years I've refined a master mindmap charting the gotta-haves and put-it-heres. Storytelling is structure.  Screenwriting is structure.  There's your secret to success.  If you sucked in a breath just now and narrowed your eyes and formed the word "but..." in your mind, you are wrong.  But you can be cured.  Zen with me now: screenwriting is structure.  Take your medicine.  Fight that burning fever driving you to start writing with no outline.  Without even a logline!  Drink deep and drink again and feel the pain and anguish lift and drift away.  You were lost but you are found.  Screenwriting is structure. Dan Harmon is our gen-X Joseph Campbell.  I mean that in a good way — not that it could be construed in a bad w...

This concern with external beauty that you reproach me for is a method for me. When I discover a disagreeable assonance or a repetition in one of my sentences, I can be sure that I'm floundering around in something false. By dint of searching, I find the right expression, which was the only one all along, and at the same time the harmonious one. The word is never lacking when one is in possession of the idea. --Gustave Flaubert, March 1876 That in response to criticism at taking a whole day to produce a single sentence. Like he says, the idea's in no hurry.  Dress it up, dress it down, keep going until you find the right look.  When you see it you'll know.  Then shove that sentence out the door and dress the next one.

It was raining. The rain dripped from the palm trees. Water stood in pools on the gravel paths. The sea broke in a long line in the rain and slipped back down the beach to come up and break again in a long line in the rain. Let's scriptify Hemmingway . Beach - Day RAIN. Dripping from the palm trees. Water stands in pools on the gravel paths. The sea breaks in a long line in the rain and slips back down the beach to come up and break again in a long line in the rain. Hell yes. Subject, verb (five strong ones), object. At least three distinct, vivid shots suggested. Look at the lengthening sentences. There's your shot pacing. And a final sentence that unfolds exactly like the action it describes.

So apparently Blogger only allows 4,096 characters in a comment on a post.  Fair enough.  "Nobody will ever need more than 4K for a comment" shall not thwart the ravings of a story guy.  Here's my comment to Go Into The Story's " What Fuels Story " article.  Any comments, please add them to the Go Into The Story article instead of here.  Thanks. @James -- You can have Wants/Needs (goals).  You can know what the obstacles are in your way.  You can have Wounds that fuel those Wants/Needs. I *want* to pass the grueling selection process and be one of the admired few to make it into the city's elite firefighter special unit: the Vapor Squad. I *need* to save people's lives.  Snatch them from the jaws of certain fiery death.  I need this because at the age of eight I watched my six-year-old sister soak herself in petrol and set herself alight.  I didn't know what to do to save her.  My parents say I'm not to blame, but we share...

Michael Arndt Stephen Hoover took notes at the Austin Film Festival when Michael Arndt spoke about cooking up Toy Story 3.  This is manna from story heaven -- not a new recipe for most structuralists out there, I expect, but tasty nonetheless.  Reading once isn't enough.  Rest, digest, then return for seconds.  Thank you, Stephen, and thank you, Michael. The First Ten Pages Establish the protagonist’s expectations for the future. What exactly are they expecting? It doesn’t have to be super positive, but it’s their realistic take on where they are headed. Establish the interactions/relationships between the characters. What is their life in its normal state. The expectations should be concrete with specific details. E.g. TOY STORY 3 (TS3) – Toys expect they will be put in the attic. Not a great expectation for the future but that’s what they think. Clear specific examples – Christmas stuff is up there, won’t be so bad. Central philosophical viewpo...