The Bitter Script Reader
Roger Ebert
Wordplayer
John August
Tuesday, 29 September 2009
Recommendations Part 2 - Podcasts
Creative Screenwriting Magazine Podcasts
Some interesting and informative interviews with screenwriters. My bedtime listening for the last few weeks.
Some interesting and informative interviews with screenwriters. My bedtime listening for the last few weeks.
Saturday, 19 September 2009
Links to Things
In the last couple of years, I've spent huge amounts of my time researching screenwriting on and offline. I'm going to start sharing the best resources I've found, a few recommendations at a time. It will help me to justify the long hours that I've spent trawling the depths of the internet.
One of the most frustrating things about the information that I've found online is that it focuses on developing the script as a commercial product. This is putting the cart before the horse. Out of say 100,000 people in the world with a completed feature length screenplay in their hands, maybe less than 100 would have a commercially viable screenplay. This does not mean that those other 99,900 writers need to work on how to pitch, network and concentrate on making their script more commercial. What they need to do is watch films, read books, read screenplays and above all work on their craft. I'm interested in resources that help a writer to improve their writing, not the ones that try to turn them into some kind of formula following pitch machine.
I think that my unique 2 step guide to screenwriting success sums up my point best.
Step 1 Get to the point when you've written the best screenplay that your talent and experience allows.
Step 2 Worry about how to sell that screenplay.
One of the most frustrating things about the information that I've found online is that it focuses on developing the script as a commercial product. This is putting the cart before the horse. Out of say 100,000 people in the world with a completed feature length screenplay in their hands, maybe less than 100 would have a commercially viable screenplay. This does not mean that those other 99,900 writers need to work on how to pitch, network and concentrate on making their script more commercial. What they need to do is watch films, read books, read screenplays and above all work on their craft. I'm interested in resources that help a writer to improve their writing, not the ones that try to turn them into some kind of formula following pitch machine.
I think that my unique 2 step guide to screenwriting success sums up my point best.
Step 1 Get to the point when you've written the best screenplay that your talent and experience allows.
Step 2 Worry about how to sell that screenplay.
Thursday, 17 September 2009
Numero Uno
Right, first proper post. Let's start simple. We'll build from here. Possibly. I'm going for some reflected glory, like Jermaine Jackson without the money.
"You can play a shoestring if you're sincere" - John Coltrane
“Never mistake motion for action.” - Ernest Hemingway
"I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?" - Ernest Hemingway
"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed" - Ernest Hemingway
"Don't go around saying the world owes you a living; the world owes you nothing; it was here first" - Mark Twain
"The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination" - Albert Einstein
"Try to learn something about everything and everything about something." - T.H Huxley
"He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonder." - M.C Escher
"Nobody can be exactly like me. Sometimes even I have trouble doing it." - Tallulah Bankhead
"The destruction of this planet would have no significance on a cosmic scale: to an observer in the Andromeda nebula, the sign of our extinction would be no more than a match flaring for a second in the heavens: and if that match does blaze in the darkness there will be none to mourn a race that used a power that could have lit a beacon in the stars to light its funeral pyre. The choice is ours." - Stanley Kubrick
"Take everything you like seriously, except yourselves." - Rudyard Kipling
"Somehow the wondrous promise of the earth is that there are things beautiful in it, things wondrous and alluring, and by virtue of your trade you want to understand them." - Mitchell Feigenbaum
"For me, it's just a normal artistic endeavour to explore the dark side. Certainly, I'm not alone in it. Artists generally don't like to accept the version of reality that society and culture hand them. They want to know what's really going on. So you're always looking in the ceilings, under the floorboards and behind the walls, trying to find the mechanisms, the structures, and the truth. I find that often leads you into some dark places." -
David Cronenberg
"All things are difficult before they are easy." - Thomas Fuller
"There was never a great genius without a tincture of madness." - Aristotle
"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." - Henry David Thoreau
"They must often change, who would be constant in happiness or wisdom." -
Confucius
“I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.” - Jorge Luis Borges
“Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.” - Jorge Luis Borges
"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you." - Ray Bradbury
"It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by.
How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?
For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows:
he catches the changes of his mind on the hop." - Vita Sackville-West
"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." - Anton Chekhov
"A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote." -
Mignon McLaughlin
"If I fall asleep with a pen in my hand, don't remove it - I might be writing in my dreams." - Danzae Pace
"The best style is the style you don't notice." - Somerset Maugham
Welcome
Hi, welcome to my blog.
I should front up from the beginning and tell you that I've started this blog in an attempt bring in some business for my script development service.
I have no fucking clue what I am going to write, and I'm doubt that I have any useful knowledge to impart.
Therefore, I'm going to add a small insignificant pile of musings to the huge steaming pile of bullshit that is the blogosphere (with a few honourable exceptions - see links). Woop!
"I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry." - John Cage
I should front up from the beginning and tell you that I've started this blog in an attempt bring in some business for my script development service.
I have no fucking clue what I am going to write, and I'm doubt that I have any useful knowledge to impart.
Therefore, I'm going to add a small insignificant pile of musings to the huge steaming pile of bullshit that is the blogosphere (with a few honourable exceptions - see links). Woop!
"I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry." - John Cage
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