Movie characters hang up the phone earlier than actual people would.
You have several choices for situations in which one character interrupts another.
Eric Heisserer offers a good example of why you need to make sure to read dialogue aloud.
A helpful tutorial on apostrophes.
Last night, I struggled with a scene that went on too long without really accomplishing its aims. The solution ended up being pretty simple: get rid of a character.
One hyphen, two hyphens or none at all?
What’s the accepted tolerance for parentheticals in screenplay dialogue?
Three quick answers on writing camera angles, formatting TV scripts and choosing a pen name.
If you have a line that only makes sense one way — and it’s not the first way someone would read it — you have a couple of choices.
Today’s scriptcast is nominally about dialogue, but I ended up switching a lot of stuff around in the scene in order to accommodate new — and less — dialogue.
It’s okay to refer to emotions in character descriptions, even beyond what the character is experience at the moment we meet him.
How you arrange the words can determine whether a line is rim-shot funny or thrown-away funny.
Jane Espenson makes the case for finding the essence before writing the jokes.
If it would be obvious to the viewer, make it obvious to the reader.
Useful suggestions for screenwriters working on their first animated feature
You’re almost never going to show the exact same thing twice. So don’t do it on the page, either.
A handy and scary glossary to terms from the Mexican drug war.
Gary Whitta wrote in with his proposed moratorium: the wall of expository newspaper clippings.
Double negative points for saying something quippy after being revived.
This compilation clip demonstrates what a hoary cliché it has become to explain why movie characters can’t use their cell phones.
Is it okay to include a brief list of characters for a particularly complex and character-rich script?
I handed in a script today, and thought it might be helpful to talk through my best practices when finishing up a draft.
Somewhat remarkably, the top two movies in America have subtitles. Lots and lots of subtitles.
Screenplays don’t cite references because they don’t quote things.
I’m busy working on Preacher, and it’s no spoiler to say that it features a gunfight or two. Last night, I twittered to ask what people’s favorite gunfights were, Western or otherwise. I got a lot of replies, but one name that kept coming up was Michael Mann. He consistently finds ways to send thousands [...]
