Screenwriting From Iowa

“I wasn’t trying to predict the future. I was trying to prevent it.”
                               Ray Bradbury
                               On writing Fahrenheit 451 
It would be a fitting end to writing about [...]

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Before Ray Bradbury wrote his masterpiece Fahrenheit 451, and before his over 500 other short stories, and TV shows and movies based on his writings he put in his 10,000 hours of learning how write.
“I wrote at least a thousand words a day every day from the age of twelve on. For years Poe was [...]

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“Zest. Gusto. How rarely one hears these words used. How rarely do we see people living, or for that matter, creating by them. Yet if I were asked to name the most important items in a writer’s make-up, the things that shape his material and rush him along the road to where he we wants [...]

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“Every town has festivals of some kind, not too many of them deal with something happening over 200 years from now.”
                                                            Phil Richman
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It’s not every day when you get the chance to re-write a major Hollywood screenwriter — so I cherish this opportunity. Recently screenwriter John August posted a video on his website an impromptu Q&A on writing. Here’s one of his exchanges:
“Stranger than Fiction writes in to ask, ‘As a married mother of three whose husband [...]

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“If you take the occasional seminar and come away with one great tip you didn’t know before, that’s a good thing. But I’ve come to believe you only learn on your own by doing it, by trying to tell stories that work. When you write 14-20 screenplays, you begin to internalize a sense of timing [...]

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“I’ve been told that I’m not smart enough to realize I can’t tilt windmills and win, but tenacity has a life and a way all its own, I’ve found. If one approach to a problem doesn’t work, figure out how to go around it”
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Since today is Memorial Day I wanted to find a quote from a screenwriter with a military background and landed on Lt. Colonel Jack Lewis in part because he just happens to be a honored veteran and a graduate of the University of  Iowa.  Before he joined the Marines and served in World War II [...]

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“(USC Film School) made me realize that this wasn’t something I could take lightly; if I was serious about it, I’d have to get my butt in gear.”
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Blake Snyder, screenwriter and author of the popular screenwriting book Save the Cat, was recently Interviewed by Demetria Dixon and this was one of her questions and his answer: 
You’ve talked about the “touched by the divine” moment . Would you expand on that?   I think we write stories and listen to stories looking for the “touched by [...]

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