Tips on Writing a Screenplay

by Bill Johnson

I teach an introduction to screenwriting class through Portland Community College. The course covers how to format and structure a screenplay, marketing, contests and outlets of the finished script, including writing a query to an agent, manager, or producer. Students work on the opening scenes of a screenplay and learn how to write a movie script.


One of the most common problems for someone writing a first script is what I call 'watch the movie, write down the details.' By this I mean mentally watching the scenes of a film script and writing down the details of what you see. This leads to a first script that is a collection of details, what characters are doing. 'Mary, blonde and athletic, walked across the room. John, stocky, male, 45, picked up the book.' These kind of flat, descriptive details are tedious to read and fail to convey the dramatic purpose of a scene.

Students will be helped in this class to replace that kind of language with a visual language appropriate for a movie script. A good resource for studying screenplays is Drews Script-o-rama.com, where scripts can be downloaded and read.

Another place that students become blocked is coming up with a sequence of scenes. In this class, I teach a 3/5 card system for organizing ideas. Each student is asked to carry some 3/5 cards around, and each time they have an idea for a scene, or dialogue, or some understanding of a character, they write it on a card, one idea to a card. This frees student from needing to understand what comes next, with just a focus on coming up with ideas. It can be very liberating. I suggest students do this until they have 40-50 cards, then start looking at how those cards can be put into some kind of order as scenes.

One of the five sessions of the class will be spent breaking down a movie like Sleepless in Seattle, which has a very transparent story structure. Many new writers to screenwriting are what I call blind imitators. They think they are doing what successful screenwriters are doing, but in reality they aren't. Conveying that Tom Hanks character in Seattle is overwhelmed by grief is different than writing that his character has brown hair and an average build.

Whether or to obtain copyright for a script is another issue students wrestle with. Technically, anything someone writes, they hold the copyright for. If you are just writing a first script and have little expectation that anything will happen with it, you don't absolulely need to pay for copyright. That said, I've been asked several times to show that I held copyright to a script, and it was a great help to have a signed copyright form when a co-writer claimed sole credit for a script we'd written together. To me, it's just part of the cost of doing business.

If a student wants to show a script to anyone in Hollywood, they do need to register their script with the WGAw (Writers Guild of America West) or WGAe, for Writers Guild of America East. Studios will not read a script that has not been registered with the WGA or submitted by a WGA certified agent.

If, by some stroke of great good fortune a studio agreed to read a student script, the other option is to have an entertainment attorney submit the script.

Final Draft is a program I recommend to students. It's a full-featured program used by production companies and producers in Hollywood.


CeltX is a free program that can be used to format a movie script. Using a formatting program saves a tremendhous amount of time.

The goal of this class is that students be able to leave the class with an ability to break down and understand the movies they are watching outside of class, as a technique to teach themselves how to write a movie script.

Good luck.

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To read some of my longer reviews of popular movies, visit my website or check out my writing workbook, A Story is a Promise, available on Amazon Kindle. Or, find me on Google+ and tell me what you think.

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Using Twitter, A Short Guide for Authors New to the Twitter-verse

by Bill Johnson

Twitter is a website (www.twitter.com) that allows people to join and post messages of 140 characters. When you join (it’s free), you can both ‘follow’ others and have ‘followers’ who receive messages you send (this message passed 140 characters with the word followers).

Twitter began as a way for people in a business to send messages (“meeting time changed to 1:30”), but it quickly became a way for people to send ‘tweets’ to friends, acquaintances, or anyone who signed up to follow a particular person.

Which made it of interest to writers looking for a way to promote books, events, blogs on writing, or just to stay in touch with other authors.

Willamette Writers, as an example, follows 2,015 people and has 2115 followers. I use the WW twitter account to send out announcements about WW meetings, activities, and events. But WW started at zero followers.

How do you gain followers?

If you’re a member of Willamette Writers interested in promoting yourself, click on the list of WW followers and find fellow authors to follow. A percentage of people you follow will, in return, follow you back.

(I suggest people limit this to 30 new followers a day. Past a certain point, you’ll get an automated pop up from Twitter saying you’re overdoing it. If you violate too many of Twitter’s guidelines (posted on their website), they will suspend or cancel your account.)

The Willamette Writers bulletin board has a new feature; you can post your name and twitter handle (the WW handle is @wilwrite; my handle is @bjscript) to ask people to follow you. It’s at http://willamettewriters.yuku.com/forums/12/Twitter-Follow.

You do need to pick a twitter handle that isn't being used by someone else.

If you want followers who have a specific interest, say science fiction conventions, you can look up Orycon in the Twitter search function and follow Orycon’s followers.

Personally, when I get new followers who are writers, I try to find a message of theirs I can ‘retweet’. This means I’m passing along someone else’s tweet, so it’s going out in their name, to my followers. Now that I do this, I pick up 10-15 new followers a day.

You can also, if it’s appropriate, copy and paste someone else’s message into a tweet that you send out, so the information goes out in your name. For example, you might pass along the name of the winner of the Oregon Book Award for fiction.

Once you join Twitter, you’ll find that all some authors do is send out messages (sometimes hourly) promoting their books. I do promote my book (A Story is a Promise & The Spirit of Storytelling), but I also make an effort to pass along information of interest to others writers. Folks I feature for retweets include Jane Friedman (helpful tweets on the world of publishing and self-publishing), Porter Anderson (Porter attends writing conferences and posts about events and workshops), and Grammar Girl (posts about writing).

I also have a general rule: if someone retweets one of my tweets, I retweet one of theirs.

Being retweeted greatly increases the reach of Twitter. I have 3,485 followers. If I send out a tweet that is retweeted by someone with their own list of 3,000 followers, my tweet has now reached 6,000 people.

But… and it’s a big butt… the more followers someone has, the faster those short tweets accumulate and pass out of sight. So, if I follow one person who follows me, and we send each other one tweet a day, we’ll each see our tweets all day. But when I send out a tweet to 3,000 people, who also have their own lists into the thousands, those messages only appear briefly. I have found that when I send out a promotional tweet with a link it gets 30-60 hits.

You can see the value, then, of tweeting something that is retweeted. That’s why I post tweets about articles on writing I have posted at my website at http://www.storyispromise.com.

You can also post live links in a tweet, or include a photo (which counts against your 140 characters). Here’s an example of a recent WW tweet,

Registration information about the 2015 Willamette Writers conference Aug 7-9 PDX now available, http://www.willamettewriters.com/wwcon

(Feel free to tweet this announcement).

If you’re counting characters, you’ll notice this is longer than 140. Twitter will automatically shorten a link (as long as it includes the http://www).

Of course, for most of us, jobs, responsibilities, family, movies, and sleep take up much of our days. The great solution to that is a program called Twuffer (http://www.twuffer.com).  Twuffer is a free program that allows you to schedule tweets in advance. I can schedule a tweet to run, say, at 3 am and another at 6 am, when I’m normally asleep (or abnormally awake; or Abby Normal, to YF fans).

Here’s a recent tweet I posted to run late at night,

Registration information for the Willamette Writers Aug 7-9 PDX conference available: Willamette Writers Conference

Here I’ve used Bitly (www.bitly.com) to shorten a link, because anything posted on Twuffer has to be 140 characters or less or it won’t upload to Twitter.

You can also add a Hashtag to a tweet; that's a complicated name for using the pound sign, #. For example, if you are doing a book promotion on Amazon, you could add the hashtag #Kindle or #FREE or #Mystery. Anyone who types in the word Mystery in a search will more easily find your tweet. In 2014, WW used the hashtag #WWCon14 to help people attending the conference 'find' each other on twitter.

Twitter allows you to post a profile, which can include a link to a website and a photo or logo. If you're an author, it's important that you have a quality head shot or a good image of a book cover. What you post in your profile will help others find you. I have come across profiles so vague, I couldn't tell if it was for an author. Sometimes you can be too clever.

Once you start putting yourself out there in the twitter-verse, be aware you’ll get followers offering to get you thousands of new followers for $100 or less. Avoid this. You get computer generate ghosts (for more about this, Google the topic). You’ll also find yourself being ‘followed’ by people with services they want you to buy (you don’t have to follow them back) or people offering sexual services (you can block unwanted followers).

You can send a DM or direct message to people on twitter if you want to comment on someone’s tweet or introduce yourself, but DO NOT send DMs to strangers promoting your novel. Your account will soon be suspended or cancelled for sending out spam.

If you follow someone and discover it’s not the right fit for you, you can easily unfollow folks, but avoid following and unfollowing large numbers of people in the same day. It violates Twitter’s guidelines. You can use a program called ManageFlitter (www.managerfllitter.com) to find and unfollow people who rarely tweet or who don’t follow you back.

Personally, I unfollow anyone who tells me what they had for breakfast. If I wasn’t there, I don’t care.

You will come across people who have 50,000 plus followers. I would probably marry someone sight unseen to have access to that list, but that’s a topic for another day.

Twitter is not the be-all, end all for book promotion, but it is a tool that has its place, especially with a program like Twuffer to help with scheduling. And, there are many other tools (use Lists on Twitter to organize followers) and apps like Hootsuite (www.hootsuite.com) that allow you to easily track what's happening with your tweets and followers.

Twitter can seem daunting from a distance, and time consuming, but using a few simple tools can make it a more productive experience.

Good luck, and happy tweeting.


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To read some of my longer reviews of popular movies, check out my writing workbook, A Story is a Promise & The Spirit of Storytelling, available on Amazon's Kindle and Smashwords.

Lyrical Writing, Notes on E Annie Proulx's The Shipping News

by Bill Johnson

Annie Proulx's The Shipping News is a great example of lyrical writing.   While her writing might seem to violate conventional writing, her style always aims at getting to a deeper truth.

Many years ago I attended a reading of published romance authors and unpublished authors. The published authors use lyrical writing judiciously.  The unpublished authors seemed to have bought adjectives on sale in 50 gallon barrels. Every pair of lips were some degree of throbbing, turgid, and swollen. It communicated nothing, unlike the published authors and Proulx.

In The Shipping News, the lyrical writing in the opening has the purpose of conveying the deeper truth of Quoyle. It is entirely organic, yet also part of a clearly defined structure.

Hitching that lyrical writing to a purposeful structure is part of what makes Proulx’s writing so dynamic and potent and insightful.

First line.

     HERE is an account of a few years in the life of Quoyle, born in Brooklyn
     and raised in a shuffle of dreary upstate towns.

This sentence offers commentary about Quoyle and the quality of his life
growing up. The language conveys much more than several pages of small towns. The
sentences gets to the heart of a truth about Quoyle.

Next paragraph.

     Hive-spangled, gut roaring with gas and cramp, he survived childhood; at
     the state university, hand clapped over his chin, he camouflaged torment with
     smiles and silence.

Another sentence and two more truths about Quoyle and his childhood and
college years.

Struggling writers usually invert this process, trying to get bland,
pedestrian details to convey something important.

     Stumbled through his twenties and into his thirties learning to separate
     his feelings from his life, counting on nothing.

This describes a character who's life is contracting, becoming less
important to him by the year.

     He ate prodigiously, liked a ham knuckle, buttered spuds.

Fat and lard, two of the most popular medications in America. As his life
contracts, Quoyle expands.

Next paragraph.

     His jobs: distributor of vending machine candy, all-night clerk in a
     convenience store, a third-rate newspaperman.

A life of no ambition and no feeling, until he becomes a third-rate
newspaperman. That sounds dramatically interesting.

Next sentence.

     At thirty-six, bereft, brimming with grief and thwarted love, Quoyle
     steered away to Newfoundland, the rock that had generated his ancestors, a place he
     had never been nor thought to go.

Grief and thwarted love apparently send Quoyle off to the place of his
ancestors to stew in his more recent failures. I'm assuming Proulx will get to what
set off this grief and thwarted love. We've quickly moved through an over of
Quoyle's life to its beginning in this novel.

Next sentence.

     A watery place. And Quoyle feared water, could not swim. Again and again
     his father had broken his clenched grip and thrown him into pools, brooks,
     lakes, and surf. Quoyle knew the flavor of brack and waterweed.

Sending Quoyle to Newfoundland and water  creates a vehicle to offer a
reason why he fears water. This is organic writing.

 Continuing.

     From the youngest son's failure to dog-paddle the father saw other failures

     multiply like an explosion of virulent cells--failure to speak clearly;
     failure to sit up straight; failure to get up in the morning; failing in attitude;
     failure in ambition and ability; indeed, in everything. His own failure.

This language conveys why Quoyle separated his mind from his feelings and
why he withdrew into himself. The world via his father started pounding him inward
at a young age.

Continuing.

     Quoyle shambled, a head taller than any child around him, was soft. He knew
     it. 

"Ah, you lout," said the father. But no pygmy himself. And brother Dick,
the father's favorite, pretended to throw up when Quoyle came into a room,
hissed "Lardass, Snotface, Ugly Pig, Warthog, Stupid, Stinkbomb, Fart-tub,
Greasebag," pummeled and kicked until Quoyle curled, hands over his head,  

sniveling, on the linoleum. All stemmed from Quoyle's chief failure, a failure of 

normal appearance.

In a short time, Proulx communicates the truth of Quoyle’s life.

            A great damp loaf of a body. At six he weighed eighty pounds. At

            Sixteen he was buried under a casement of flesh. Head shaped

            Like a Crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair ruched back. Features as

            Kissed fingertips. Eyes the color of plastic. The monstrous chin, a

            Freakish shelf jutting from the lower face.

Then, after Quoyle drops out of college…

            Nothing was clear to lonesome Quoyle. His thoughts churned

            Like the armophous thing that ancient sailoers, drifting into arctic

            half-light, call the Sea Lung; a heaving sludge of ice under fog

            where air burred into water, where liquid was solid, where solids

            dissolved, where the sky froze and llight and dark muddled.

Here Proulx moves from an outer description of Quoyle, to language that conveys the truth of his inner life.

Qyoyle is a man who has been damned since birth, who, during the course of this novel, travels to the edge of the world to find a place he might belong. This will not be an easy journey, but it will be one deeply felt by the novel’s readers.

This kind of lyrical language works when it takes a story’s reader deep into the heart of a story and it’s characters, and Proulx does that here.

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Bill Johnson is the author of A Story is a Promise & The Spirit of Storytelling, available on AmazonKindle for $2.99 and on Smashwords.  He teaches workshops on writing around the US. He is currently the office manager for Willamette Writers, a group in the Pacrific Northwest with 1,700 members.

No Pressure. Really. It’s Just Your Follow-up Novel, by Damon Ferrell Marbut

The novel following a debut tends toward two basic anxieties:

1. The second book must live up to the first, provided the debut received critical praise.

2. The second book, if a sequel or as part of a series, must also cover 1. but additionally either lend the attachment to the first book a satisfying finality or give room for extension of the series.

Agents, editors and publishers can have significant effects on the labor of creating a new book as a product to market and from which to profit. Or, the self-published author managing his/her own career trajectory might be as nervous based on personal performance expectations. But then, the latter could be comfortable with a follow-up novel because producing the first yielded for them a sense of security in the industry.

I don't find myself in either listed scenario above. Once realizing my current work was becoming a new novel I began determining multiple forms of space in which to write, including schedule and the necessarily quiet physicality of the work itself. I only thought of the book as a follow-up once the first draft was finished after Christmas 2012. I did, by nature, consider my debut, Awake in the Mad World, before recognizing further that the new book is uniquely its own and beyond my scope of comparison.

Also, my debut wasn't really a debut. I wrote three novels and a 220-page collection of letters in addition to 2-3 volumes of poems before Awake in the Mad World published. I understand many authors don’t consider themselves writers until they publish and also experience this same phenomenon. They write prolifically and then choose which manuscript to forge ahead with to press. Others do not. They spend years letting a story marinate and then perhaps take years to write it.

Accepting pressure to perform is too much thinking work in terms of the second book. It's unwelcome distraction. I hope for evolution with each book I write and wish not to compete with those that come before it. I don’t write in serial. New characters lead themselves into original existence without attachment to those of my former novels. I believe the initial commitment and compulsion to a story, to characters, to the art of narrative and experimentation should be the only drive behind continuing to write. Writing because I must. The audience creates itself around my work, as well as defines its impact. To consider anything other than what is written best in the moment is to kill the follow-up before it is finished.

                              +++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Bio:

Damon Ferrell Marbut is a Southern novelist and poet. He is author of Awake in the Mad World, which is currently an entrant for the Pulitzer Prize. Originally from Mobile, Alabama Marbut now lives in New Orleans, Louisiana where he is finishing a new novel set in the Big Easy.

Links:

Website: www.damonferrellmarbut.com

Amazon Author Page: http://www.amazon.com/Damon-Ferrell-Marbut/e/B008E72MCK

Karen Azinger's The Poison Priestess Reviewed on Goodreads

"Desire is often the greatest poison."

One of, I think, the greatest lines I have read in any book. In addition to providing a fantastic commentary on our world it perfect serves to sum up Ms. Azinger's most recent book. Please understand, I don't mean to say desiring the book too much poison's the experience, but that the book itself perfectly blends poison and desire into one of the best fantasy books I have read in the past twelve months.

Every time I pick up one of the Silk and Steel books I do so with a certain amount of trepidation. Could this book possibly be as good as the past one/two/three have been? And each time I have been happy to answer that yes, yes they could. This time I can say that this book is in fact BETTER than those which preceded it, something I never expected to say.

The Poison Priestess begins during the same time frame as the Skeleton King, except where that book focused on event to the north or Erdhe this book contains itself to the south. For fans of the stories of Liandra, Steward, and Jordan this book will strike a perfect cord. The action is fast past in all the right parts, while slowing down at some places to allow the depth of the events which just happened to sink in. Azinger's miraculous use of pacing and tone are in full display in this book and it shines because of them.
The story of Liandra especially fleshes out in this novel. Torn between emotion and duty her character deepens and anneals into something completely new and amazing. I must say that although she has long been my favorite character she definitely came into her own this time. 

The other stories are just as rich and rewarding, from the darkly sinister Lord Raven's march towards Laverness and Pellanor to the Priestess's seductive personality. Each is peppered with surprises and plot twists so shocking that I often found myself rereading passages to make sure I was right in what I thought was going on. Hints of foreshadowing also are woven into the story so numerously that I doubt any reader could ever catch them all on a first try. One detail especially sticks in my mind as one of the best hidden bits of foreshadowing I've read to date. 

In totality if you've already begun down the path of the Silk and Steel Saga prepare yourself for a return to Erdhe which, while darker than any of the preceding books, most definitely deserves its place in the series. If your new to the series stop reading this moment and go buy the first book, it is most certainly a series which gets better with every book and is well worth the investment. 

As Erdhe girds for war readers wait in anticipation for The Battle Immortal.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16141427-the-poison-priestess