3-2-1 Screenwriting |

Aug 21

3 Thoughts

This industry has had to reinvent itself its entire life - what we’re going through right now is just the next iteration. Story will always matter even if the precise form of output changes from screenwriting, to podcasting, to TikTok and beyond.

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If you are having trouble getting through an early draft try to write something actively bad. You’ll find it takes enough pressure off to clear the pipes and weirdly makes everything much more fun.
We aim for quality, but don’t forget there are plenty of actively bad movies that have made a TON of money.

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Someone has to succeed - why not you?

2 Quotes

I finished Unreasonable Hospitality and moved on to Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I’ve been using this research to design a new and more sustainable offer to help people write more consistently. More on this coming soon.

“Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue…as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.”

Forgive me for returning to STORY by Robert McKee, as it is one of my favorite and most helpful resources. This may be a bit textbook but I find it perennially useful to return to the basics:

”A STORY EVENT creates meaningful change in the life situation of a character that is expressed and experienced in terms of VALUE. […]
STORY VALUES are the universal qualities of human experience that may shift from positive to negative, or negative to positive from one moment to the next […]
A STORY EVENT creates meaningful change in the life situation of a character that is expressed and experienced in terms of a value and ACHIEVED THROUGH CONFLICT. […]
For a typical film, the writer will choose forty to sixty Story Events or, as they’re commonly known, scenes.
A SCENE is an action through conflict in more or less continuous time and space that turns the value-charged condition of a character’s life on at least one value with a degree of perceptible significance. Ideally every scene is a STORY EVENT.”

Basically - something important needs to shift in each scene/ story event. In a horror a character could move from safety to danger. Other value changes could be from loyalty to betrayal, Hope to Despair, Tension to Release, etc.