I have a weakness for overly-complex plots. When I first dream up a story, I worry about the wrong things: “Is that it?” “Are there en...

This is hard to believe, but ten years ago, comics fans were still convinced that the movies would never take them seriously. Then Sam ...

Bait and switch time, people: before I get to the current crisis (bumped back to tomorrow), I want to look at another way that writers attem...

As long as people have told stories, they have tried to avoid starting a story from scratch. Don’t worry, it’s only an adaptation, or a rem...

Let ’s say that you ’re a homemaker in middle America. Your neighbor has come over seeking to be re-assured because she’s worried abou...

For this new project, let’s pick up where we left off in a piece I wrote a few months ago about…  --Wait! Stop! That’s exactly the ...

It’s day two of Election Week, doncha know. (And for our neither-American-nor-Brazilian readers, you’ll just have to play along.) Here’s...

As I discussed yesterday, your story is the sizzle, and the characters are the steak. This is the sexy part. And it’s the democratic part....

Last week, I talked about how hard it hard it is to get the hero and villain to both try to kill each other in thrillers, then I talked abo...

I talked yesterday about how nobody would actually try to fight back if they were in an actual thriller-type situation. In real life, eve...

I’ve been writing a lot of thriller treatments for production companies recently. The more I write, the more I worry that the genre just d...

A while ago, I was talking to another writer about his sitcom development deal, and of course he was agonizing about the endless number of n...

You board a airplane. You’ve brought a good book that you’re dying to read. Then the person sitting next to you turns to you and star...

As I mentioned yesterday, Peter Stone is one of my favorite writers and Charade is his masterpiece. The movie is powered by the ultra-cha...

There’s been a fun trend recently of YouTube montages of movie clichés. John August has been posting them on his screenwriting blog as red ...

Beginning writers have one goal: They want to defy expectations. They know that most movies are boring and clichéd, so they try to write...

Here’s a follow-up to yesterday’s rule about throwing away the map. I finally got around to seeing the first Twilight movie, which made f...

The Lord of the Rings trilogy has a lot to answer for. Like the books they’re based on, these movies do some things very well and other thi...