22 hours ago by Jordan

After all this talk about character arcs, I was browsing around on an interesting screenwriting blog, and found an article kind of a rguing against character arcs. So are character arcs necessary? The answer, of course, is it depends—and it depends on several factors. In plot-driven fiction, for exa ...

Jordan McCollum - jordanmccollum.com · Rank: 87,200 · 29 references

3 days ago by Jordan

Yesterday, we talked about character arcs within scenes, and we mentioned that there are two different ways to handle them. The first kind uses scene structure to bring about the change. The second kind of change, however, doesn’t rely on scene structure because it doesn’t happen in a scene— it happ ...

Jordan McCollum - jordanmccollum.com · Rank: 87,200 · 29 references

4 days ago by Jordan

So far, we’ve looked at character arcs on a macro level—characters changing over the course of a story. At the beginning of the series, however, Deb pointed out that characters can also have arcs within a single scene, where they go from one emotion to another, possibly opposite, emotion. Character ...

Jordan McCollum - jordanmccollum.com · Rank: 87,200 · 29 references

8 days ago by Jordan

So we’ve figured out what drives our characters, and where they’ll start and end their internal character journeys. So what happens in the middle? Obviously, if our characters start at one extreme (fear, loneliness, naivete) and go to the other (courage, love, wisdom), some pretty extreme things are ...

Jordan McCollum - jordanmccollum.com · Rank: 87,200 · 29 references

9 days ago by Jordan

Of course, the method we talked about yesterday works great if you already know your plot and character (if you’re at the end of planning, in drafting or in revisions). But what if you don’t really know your characters well yet, or you’re trying to find a good internal conflict, or you still can’t f ...

Jordan McCollum - jordanmccollum.com · Rank: 87,200 · 29 references

10 days ago by Jordan

Character arcs are an important part of making any story satisfying. As we said yesterday, it’s as simple as making sure a character grows and changes throughout the course of the story. It’s important to remember that these changes, too, are most effective if they’re brought about by the external p ...

Jordan McCollum - jordanmccollum.com · Rank: 87,200 · 29 references

11 days ago by Jordan

This week, I’m looking to cover an oft-mentioned, seldom-explained part of storytelling: character arcs. It’s easy to get caught up on the plotting and planning of a new story’s events that we don’t think as much about the characters. I’ve made a habit of getting started on a story’s events and in t ...

Jordan McCollum - jordanmccollum.com · Rank: 87,200 · 29 references

22 days ago by Stacy Cohen

“Write what you know” is probably the most common piece of writing advice ever. For me, I bent that advice to, “write what you’re passionate about and fascinated by.” In following that advice, I ended up writing a historical romance. And while there are many great pieces of literature that could be ...

Stacy Cohen - stacycohen.com

28 days ago by Administrator

There’s an old adage in the screenwriting world, “grab the reader in the first 10 pages”. It refers to what’s needed to sell a script in today’s highly competitive market. Based on the sheer number of scripts written each year; movie executives could not possibly attempt to read even a fraction of t ...

Victor Grippi - The Atomic ... - atomicwriter.com/blog3

57 days ago by ginger

After going over the ways to make a character likable, I want to point out that your characters can and should be flawed. Every hero in a film needs to have experienced some trauma in their past that has caused them to react to the world in an unhealthy way. The experience that they will go through ...

Why This is Good - whythisisgood.com