Your characters’ relationships to one another should be evident in dialogue and action.  You should show what they mean to one another in how they are with one another.  You don’t necessarily need to call it out and say ‘he’s my boyfriend’ but even if you do, it should be evident in how they relate [...]

Continued from yesterday Awkward, Unnatural Dialogue We’ve all read scripts or seen movies where we thought, “Nobody talks like that.”  It takes us out of the scene, ruins the moment for us.  Sometimes it’s the result of exposition, but sometimes, it’s just awkward phrasing.  New writers are so eager to get stuff down on paper, [...]

Part II will address points 4 & 5 and be published at 10AM tomorrow. It’s one thing to be told to write sizzling dialogue, but quite another to recognize when the dialogue you’ve written doesn’t.  There are essentially five reasons your dialogue is flat: on-the-nose: describes exactly what’s happening in the scene no subtext: character [...]

Billy’s second session was more about the current trend in comedy toward the raunchy, Judd Apatow type of humour. Establishing The Comedic World The first thing you need to do in order for audiences to accept this kind of humour is to establish likable characters.  If we like the characters, we’re willing to go anywhere [...]

The other day I attended a script reading that got me thinking about what was missing from his writing beyond the basic structural flaws, story issues, and underdeveloped characters.  The writer lacked one major thing: a basic understanding of the human condition. Sadly, a handful of people, writer included, couldn’t see that all the female characters were either bitches [...]