Some readers had questions they didn’t get to ask on the call-in show last night, so I answered them this morning.
Unanswered Questions from John August on Vimeo.
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Writing better scene openings
Today’s [scriptcast](http://johnaugust.com/archives/category/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.
Writing better action
A new screencast (scriptcast?), a little shorter than the [previous one](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/scene-description).
In the audio, I say “parallel action,” but a better term would be parallel structure: You’re lining up sentences to omit the subject. Action sequences tend to benefit from these staccato word bursts.
Gender-specific douchery
In this [YouTube clip](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWUcVj31QaM&feature=PlayList&p=FC7BDC8774187EAE&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=53), Jonathan Coulton gives some backstory on the Portal videogame
COULTON
This song is sung by one of the characters in the game. She’s an artificial intelligence, and she’s kind of an asshole.
That got a laugh, and for good reason: we so rarely refer to women as assholes.
And I don’t really know why. There are many gender-specific terms for hateful men and women, so it’s surprising that one which should be equally-applicable is almost always used for men only.
And yes, I got the sheet music to “Still Alive.”