Back to the Drawing Board: Blake Snyder’s Structure Method

Now that the summer’s come and gone, I've gotten back to my own writing. Namely, the one script that has plagued me for years: Ciao. Ciao is more than a story. It’s a tribute to a family friend who had a great influence on my development and love of movies. I only have a smattering of memories to work with, the rest is letters and papers he wrote when he was alive.

Reading my current draft, something dawned on me: my script sucked. It was thin and fake. There was no substance to my characters, and they were talking heads in a 2-d world.

As Willum Dafoe said in Spiderman. “Back to formula.” That’s where Blake Snyder comes in.

What I Learned from Reading a Hundred Crappy Pilots

This was the summer of "meh."

I read about 125 screenplays total. They were of all varieties and genres, from the almost painfully mundane to the beyond fantastic. I read one or two gems, scripts that really blew my mind. However, the overwhelming majority this year were, for lack of a better way of putting it, just okay. It took me a long time to figure out why.

The Brutal Ten Percent

I’m only a fifth of the way into my quota, and already I’m struggling. I’m holding off on my judgment of some scripts. I’m delaying my decision. I want to wait. Most of the time people hold off on a good thing because they fear they may miss something better. I’m doing quite the opposite: I’m looking for something worse.

The First Victim, or “Why You Should Make an American Friend.”

I was initially surprised by my first stack of scripts. I seemed to have a pretty tough job ahead of me. I had to identify the top 10% of all the scripts, and already there was more than one I wanted to push through.

But more on those later. Let’s talk about the one that was definitely NOT going to be advancing to the next round.

Austin Film Fest 2011 – Day 1: Orientation

I always hate it when my coworkers are left to finish the day at work and say “it’s nothing personal” when they complain. That means it’s absolutely personal and I’ll have hell to pay when I get back.

Preeow, world!

Nice to meat you, blogosphere! I'm Steven, and this is my blog. I have a blog now. I am blogging about it. That's kind of silly.