There is quite a strong online screenwriting community which seems to mainly consist of screenwriting hopefuls who will blog about every positive comment they have ever received from a professional in the film and television industry, and actual screenwriting professionals who complain about how poor, clichéd, and mistake ridden the scripts from screenwriting hopefuls are.
A blog I enjoyed reading was Screenwriting Tips...You Hack. It is written by a script reader called Xander Bennett and it basically consists of the don’ts of screenwriting. This blog is a collection of short, snide tips about screenwriting, originally in the form of Tweets. In this blog, there is a range of technical, plot, and character tips. Some examples are:
Screenwriting Tip #18
Don’t use “air quotes” when they’re “completely unwarranted”.
Screenwriting Tip #42
Don’t have your protagonist’s family members keel over dead in lieu of having an actual Act 2 Dark Point. Random events like this should be the icing on the cake of your protagonist’s misery, not the sum total of it.
This is quite a good point. There should not be coincidences in a screenplay in Act 2. Coincidences are anti-climatic. They are a cop-out and undermine the process of setting up and establishing the elements in Act 1. They are unsatisfying to read.
He also makes snarky comments about clichés in screenplays.
Screenwriting Tip #40
There shall be no characters climbing out of bathroom windows to escape bad dates, nor indeed bedroom windows to escape grounding. It’s shit. A gibbon with a typewriter could probably do better.
Screenwriting Tip #62
‘Ethnic Guy Who Swears Five Times In Every Sentence’ isn’t a character, it’s a bad SNL sketch. (And Apatow already did it better than you.)
Look at his blog for more tips.
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I agree that there are an incredible number of movies being made with those screenwriting tips, but then again they are specifically for a particular market.
ReplyDeleteFunding plays a big part in what movies are made. There are a lot of good scripts out there but no one wants to film them. But then again, there are a lot of bad scripts and scripts that get ruined and manipulated by directors and producers.
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