Billy Wilder: 10 Screenwriting Tips
Billy Wilder: 10
Screenwriting Tips
Billy Wilder was one of the greatest writer/directors in film history,
having co-written and directed such classics as Sunset Boulevard, Some
Like it Hot, The Apartment, and Double Indemnity.
What screenwriter wouldn't want a little advice from him?
Well, here are some of Wilder's screenwriting tips:
1. The audience is fickle.
2. Grab 'em by the throat and never let 'em go.
3. Develop a clean line of action for your leading character.
4. Know where you're going.
5. The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the
better you are as a writer.
6. If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the
first act.
7. A tip from Lubitsch: Let the audience add up two plus two. They'll love
you forever.
8. In doing voice-overs, be careful not to describe what the audience
already sees. Add to what they're seeing.
9. The event that occurs at the second act curtain triggers the end of the
movie.
10.
The third act must build, build, build in tempo and
action until the last event, and then—that's it. Don't hang around.
Andrew Motion: 10
Techniques to Spark the Writing - Expert writing tips
Andrew Motion has garnered the highest acclaim as a poet, including a
knighthood and the post of Poet Laureate of the UK. In addition to his many
books of poetry, Motion has published seminal biographies of poets and been a
leading champion of poetry in the contemporary world. Though he has reached the
pinnacle, he seeks to write poetry meaningful to all.
10 Techniques to Spark the
Writing
1. Decide when in the day (or night) it best suits you to write, and
organise your life accordingly.
2. Think with your senses as well as your brain.
3. Honour the miraculousness of the ordinary.
4. Lock different characters/elements in a room and tell them to get on.
5. Remember there is no such thing as nonsense.
6. Bear in mind Wilde's dictum that “only mediocrities develop"— and
challenge it.
7. Let your work stand before deciding whether or not to serve.
8. Think big and stay particular.
9. Write for tomorrow, not for today.
10.
Work hard.
Annie Proulx: 5 Techniques
for Good Craftsmanship - Expert writing tips
Annie Proulx writes literary fiction brilliant enough to win major
accolades (Pulitzer, National Book Award, etc.) and accessible enough to win a
wide audience. She specializes in short stories, including “Brokeback
Mountain," though her masterpiece may be the novel The Shipping
News. She didn't begin writing until in her 50s and, as you'll see, she
doesn't believe in rushing things.
5 Techniques for Good Craftsmanship
1. Proceed slowly and take care.
2. To ensure that you proceed slowly, write by hand.
3. Write slowly and by hand only about subjects that interest you.
4. Develop craftsmanship through years of wide reading.
5. Rewrite and edit until you achieve the most felicitous
phrase/sentence/paragraph/page/story/chapter.
Edgar Allan Poe: 5
Essentials for the Betterment of a Story
Edgar Allan Poe penned immortal poems, such as “The Raven" and
“Annabel Lee," and unforgettable tales of psychological horror, such as
“The Tell-Tale Heart," “The Masque of Red Death," The Cask of
Amontillado," and “The Fall of the House of Usher." He was also a
prominent literary critic and essayist, as well as the inventor of the
detective story.
In a recently-found treatise, he set down the following advice for
bettering a story: *
1. Employ an unreliable narrator, preferably one who doesn't know he is
insane and has no recollection of such events as digging into a grave to rip
out the teeth of his recently departed lover.
2. Include a beautiful woman with raven locks and porcelain skin,
preferably quite young, and let her die tragically of some unknown ailment.
3. Use grandiloquent words, such as heretofore, forthwith, and nevermore. A
little Latin will also enhance the text.
4. Do not shy away from such grotesqueries as inebriation, imprisonment,
insanity, and men costumed as orangutans being burned to death.
5. When in doubt, bury someone alive.
Henry Miller: 10 Writing
Tips
Henry Miller created something of a new literary form:
semi-autobiographical novels that merged storytelling with philosophy, mysticism,
and social commentary, all spiced up with explicit sexual scenes (which is why
his books were banned in the US until 1961). His most famous books: Tropic
of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, Black Spring,
and The Rosy Crucifixion.
1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.
2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to Black Spring.
(Apparently he's giving himself this advice.)
3. Dont be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in
hand.
4. Work according to the program and not according to mood. Stop at the
appointed time!
5. When you cant create you can work.
6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
7. Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
8. Dont be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
9. Discard the Program when you feel like itbut go back to it the next day.
Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
10.
Forget the books you want to write. Think only of
the book you are writing.
11.
Write first and always. Painting, music, friends,
cinema, all these come afterwards.
Jack Kerouac: 30 Cool Tips
Jack Kerouac was one of those writers who reinvented literature. He
climbed in James Joyce's stream of consciousness car then careened down the
streets of Beat poetry and the alleyways of Bebop jazz, creating such novels
as The Dharma Bums, Big Sur, and the landmark On
the Road. He influenced countless writers and, some say, helped usher in
the 1960s counter-culture movement.
Fellow writers were always asking Kerouac how he did what he did. So
Kerouac set down 30 essentials in something he called “Belief and Technique for
Modern Prose." These tips may or may not make sense to you, but that's
Kerouac, man:
1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10.
No time for poetry but exactly what is
11.
Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12.
In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13.
Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical
inhibition
14.
Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15.
Telling the true story of the world in interior
monolog
16.
The jewel center of interest is the eye within the
eye
17.
Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18.
Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in
language sea
19.
Accept loss forever
20.
Believe in the holy contour of life
21.
Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists
intact in mind
22.
Don't think of words when you stop but to see
picture better
23.
Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr
morning
24.
No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience,
language & knowledge
25.
Write for the world to read and see yr exact
pictures of it
26.
Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual
American form
27.
In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman
Loneliness
28.
Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from
under, crazier the better
29.
You're a Genius all the time
30.
Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored &
Angeled in Heaven
Kurt Vonnegut: 8 Basics of
Creative Writing
Kurt Vonnegut created some of the most outrageously memorable novels of
our time, such as Cat's Cradle, Breakfast Of Champions,
and Slaughterhouse Five. His work is a mesh of contradictions: both
science fiction and literary, dark and funny, classic and counter-culture,
warm-blooded and very cool. And it's all completely unique.
With his customary wisdom and wit, Vonnegut put forth 8 basics of what
he calls Creative Writing 101:
1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not
feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of
water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the
action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters,
make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are
made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to
the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible.
To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what
is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should
cockroaches eat the last few pages.
Ronald Knox: 10
Commandments of Detective Fiction
Ronald Knox was a mystery writer in the early part of the 20th century
who belonged to the Detection Club, a society peopled by such legendary mystery
writers as Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, G. K. Chesterson, and E. C.
Bentley. Among his novels: The Viaduct Murder, Double Cross Purposes,
Still Dead.
Knox was also a Catholic priest, which is perhaps why he was tempted to
write a 10 Commandments of detective fiction. If you write such stories, thou
shalt obey these laws:*
1. The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story,
but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.
2. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of
course.
3. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which
will need a long scientific explanation at the end.
5. No Chinaman must figure in the story.
6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an
unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
7. The detective must not himself commit the crime.
8. The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly
produced for the inspection of the reader.
9. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any
thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but
very slightly, below that of the average reader.
10.
Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not
appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.
Zadie Smith: 10 Good
Writing Habits
Zadie Smith rocked the literary world in her late twenties with her
novel White Teeth, a look into various lives in contemporary
multicultural London. She followed this up with the novels The
Autograph Man and On Beauty, and she is also a leading
light in literary criticism. She is considered one of the freshest and most
ambitious voices of her generation.
10 Good Writing Habits
1. When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time
doing this than anything else.
2. When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or
even better, as an enemy would.
3. Don't romanticise your “vocation." You can either write good
sentences or you can't. There is no “writer's lifestyle." All that matters
is what you leave on the page.
4. Avoid your weaknesses. But do this without telling yourself that the
things you can't do aren't worth doing. Don't mask self-doubt with contempt.
5. Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.
6. Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won't make your
writing any better than it is.
7. Work on a computer that is disconnected from the Internet.
8. Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from
it, even the people who are most important to you.
9. Don't confuse honours with achievement.
10.
Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to
hand—but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never
being satisfied.
Rejection: 3 Methods for
Coping
Rejection is part of a writer's life. Anyone who wants to make it as a
writer needs to learn to face rejection bravely, gracefully, and frequently.
Three tips for coping with rejection:
1. Laugh at your rejections.
2. Learn from your rejections.
3. Always have a new project underway, something that will give you hope no
matter how many rejections come your way for the previous project.
You may take some consolation in knowing the rejection history of these
writers and works:
Dune by Frank Herbert – 13 rejections
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone – 14 rejections
Auntie Mame by Patrick Dennis – 17 rejections
Jonathan Livingston Seagull – 18
rejections
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle – 29
rejections
Carrie by Stephen King – over 30 rejections
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell – 38
rejections
A Time to Kill by John Grisham – 45 rejections
Louis L'Amour, author of over 100 western novels – over 300 rejections
before publishing his first book
John Creasy, author of 564 mystery novels – 743 rejections before
publishing his first book
Ray Bradbury, author of over 100 science fiction novels and stories –
around 800 rejections before selling his first story
The Tale of Peter Rabbit by
Beatrix Potter – rejected so universally the author decided to self-publish the
book
From rejection slip for George Orwell's Animal Farm:
“It is impossible to sell animal stories in the U.S.A."
From rejection slip for Norman MacLean's A River Runs Through It:
“These stories have trees in them."
From rejection slip for article sent to the San Francisco
Examiner to Rudyard Kipling:
“I'm sorry, Mr. Kipling, but you just don't know how to use the English
language."
From rejection slip for The Diary of Anne Frank:
“The girl doesn't, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling
which would lift that book above the curiosity level."
Rejection slip for Dr. Seuss's And To Think That I Saw It on
Mulberry Street:
“Too different from other juveniles on the market to warrant its
selling."
Rejection from a Chinese economic journal:
“We have read your manuscript with boundless delight. If we were to
publish your paper, it would be impossible for us to publish any work of lower
standard. And as it is unthinkable that in the next thousand years we shall see
its equal, we are, to our regret, compelled to return your divine composition,
and to beg you a thousand times to overlook our short sight and timidity."
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