Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

Research not only wins the war on cliché, it’s the key to victory over fear and its cousin, depression.

nervosity;

the unlived life isn’t worth examining.

The audience wants to know how it feels to be alive on the knife edge of the now.

Limitation is vital. The first step toward a well-told story is to create a small, knowable world.

All writing is discipline, but screenwriting is a drill sergeant.

The source of all art is the human psyche’s primal, prelinguistic need for the resolution of stress and discord through beauty and harmony, for the use of creativity to revive a life deadened by routine, for a link to reality through our instinctive, sensory feel for the truth.

we must never mistake criticism for art.

With rare exceptions, unrecognized genius is a myth.