Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
always said that Bernie didn’t bet on the horses, he bet on the jockeys. Michael Bennett comes up with a musical. Mike Nichols comes up with a play, Neil Simon with a play. You try to get their shows in your theaters. So Sondheim comes up with a musical—you say yes. William Goldman used to say, “Nobody knows anything. Every time out, it’s a guess.”
... See moreJames Lapine • Putting It Together: How Stephen Sondheim and I Created "Sunday in the Park with George
Dramatic Irony: Employ Hitchcock’s favorite device and hide from the protagonist a fact known to the audience.
Robert McKee • Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting
Excellent film dialogue tends to shape itself into the periodic sentence:
Robert McKee • Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting
Screenplays are structure. Precisely made Swiss clocks of emotion.
Blake Snyder • Save the Cat
Screenplays are structure. Precisely made Swiss clocks of emotion.
Blake Snyder • Save the Cat
The movie producer and all-around mensch Stuart Cornfeld once told me that in a good screenplay, every structural unit needs to do two things: (1) be entertaining in its own right and (2) advance the story in a non-trivial way. We will henceforth refer to this as “the Cornfeld Principle.”
George Saunders • A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life
It’s important to structure your logline around an active protagonist.