Category: Writing Tips

My Fremantle Online Series – What’s in a Name?

Probably one of the hardest tasks in getting my new FremantleMedia online series up and running is finding the right name. It’s been the source of endless meetings, intense discussions and general agonizing and floundering all around. Why is this naming business so hard? Probably because naming an online series is so important to its success. Here are my thoughts on the process.

AFI Digital Storytelling Conference

The AFI DigiFest 2009 is a great opportunity to learn about cutting-edge storytelling and media prototypes created at AFI and across the country. Free registration and links here.

Writer Access Project

The Writer Access Project is designed to identify excellent diverse writers with television experience and to bring these writers’ scripts to the attention of showrunners, creative executives and agents for consideration during staffing season. Info here.

Map Yourself

A good writer thoroughly understands his or her characters’ emotions, inner conflicts and the whole process of internal transformation. Great writers dig deep to find this emotional truth within themselves.

#BeFabFriday – Joyce Carol Oates: Why We Write

#BeFabFriday – Life has no meaning without the narrative we construct around it.

Vulnerability Scenes

Everyone who has heard me speak or teach knows how fundamental vulnerability is to making a movie or television show memorable. The way an audience BONDS with a character is through scenes where the character is vulnerable. Here are some of my favorites– what are yours?

Laughing Until It Hurts

“Comedy is never the gaiety of things, it is the groan made gay,” wrote drama critic Walter Kerr. This is the great irony implicit in comedy. It feels good to walk out of a theater laughing. But we often go into the theater not feeling so good. Many times, what makes us laugh is seeing that other people are not feeling so good either.

Mobile Micro-Blog Novel Writing

The Micro-Blog Novel is shaking up a publishing industry that has been declining for a decade. An author of fiction is lucky to sell a few thousand copies of a title. A popular cell-phone novelist sells several hundred thousand, and recruitment for new talent is intense.

Write Every Day

Here’s how to put Martin Scorcese’s philosophy into practice every day. Below is a FREE LESSON from the One Hour Screenwriter eBook.