I’ll be doing a live call-in interview with ScreenTalk tonight at 6PM PDT.
Update: Tomorrow, I’ll post a link to the audio. (It’s an embedded player.) For tonight, visit the ScreenTalk site. Player embedded after the “More” jump.
Update #2: We never actually got to the call-in questions (maybe there weren’t any), so if you had one that didn’t get asked, ask below and I’ll try to answer.
Great quote from Alvin Sargent in the most recent Written By:
Somebody told me once, “If you have a problem with a character, give the problem to the character because it’s not my problem.” It’s truly their problem and you have to watch and wait and see what they do that makes some kind of sense. Sooner or later, if they are really people, they will do something, or someone else will come and help them. But I have nothing to do with it. If you have a problem, give it to the character.
Characters are not responsible for plot; you as the writer have to decide what you’re showing, when and why. But your characters need to be responsible for the actions they take. The reader and the audience can feel when characters are doing something simply for story’s sake.
Think of yourself as the producer of a reality show. You’ve hopefully cast interesting people, who will do and say interesting things. You’ll create obstacles that will force them to react. You’ll shoot a bunch of footage and edit it to tell the story you want. But if you’re pushing your characters around, telling them exactly what you want them to do, the audience will feel the manipulation — and your characters will resent it.
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.
Terrific talk by Elizabeth Gilbert from the TED series. Nineteen minutes well spent.
Thanks to Rawson for the link.