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Writing better scene openings

April 28, 2009 How-To, Scriptcast

Today’s scriptcast focuses on how you start scenes.

The standard advice is always to come into a scene as late as possible, and exit as soon as you can. That’s a lot of what I’m doing in this tutorial. By picking the right opening action (or opening line), you can jump past a lot of boilerplate and get to the meat of the scene. Along the way, you can provide more texture and detail to keep it from feeling so generic.

To save your eyes from the tiny type, you may want to go full-screen. That’s the second button from the right on the bottom of the video.

Related Posts

  1. Writing better action
  2. Writing better scene description
  3. Renumbering when moving a scene

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