Screenwriting Tips
The Heart and Soul of Screenwriting: Writing good dialogue and description
By Gordy Hoffman
Writing dialogue and description is writing a screenplay. You can argue
about format and tab margins and what to capitalize and what not. I
won't. Dialogue and description is where the experience of screenplay
for your reader lives. We write screenplays to make movies. They are
not literature. They are directions for people to make motion pictures.
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Discovering the Great Movie Idea for Your Next Screenplay
by Gordy Hoffman
I am lucky. I have no problems coming up with very good ideas for
movies. If I never had another idea for the rest of my life, I would
not make a sizable dent in the ones I already have. Screenwriters who
struggle with coming up with an idea tend to be visibly annoyed when I
tell them this.
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Screenwriting Tips from a Screenplay Contest Judge
by Gordy Hoffman
After cracking hundreds of screenplays sent into the BlueCat Screenplay
Competition, the same problems in the execution of the story and script
continue to emerge. Here is a general overview of these persistent
issues.
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How to Start a Screenplay: Treatment or Free Fall?
by Gordy Hoffman
Starting a screenplay can sometimes be as hard as finishing one.
Impatient to pull up to the front door of a classic motion
picture, I want to get everything right so quickly.
This impatience challenges my trust in the work, the creative process
of screenwriting.
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Writing the Classic Movie Ending (How to Finish your Screenplay!)
by Gordy Hoffman
I've only finished so many screenplays in my life. Writing a script all
the way to the very last page is always an extremely significant,
personal achievement for me. A large part of its significance is the
reality that I actually wrote an ending, or, at the very least, typed
"THE END."
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Rewriting your Screenplay: The Road to your Audience
by Gordy Hoffman
The promise of the rewrite is very sweet. I have collected evidence
that the more authentic the labor put into rewriting your screenplay,
the greater the reward, and the reward is high, for whatever lovely,
wonderful moments you might have discovered in the frightening process
of plowing through the first draft, those moments, those seeds, are
only seeds, and they only fulfill their destiny as giant, involving
scenes in the movie that screens before people
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If you would like to publish these articles, please email gordy@screenplaynotes.com.
©2008 Gordy Hoffman