Screenwriting From Iowa

“We have already heard every story ever told. Like little kids who ask for the same tale over and over again, told in exactly the same way, we too respond to hidden patterns. The elements that vibrate in us like a running fork — the stories that truly resonate — are based on patterns deep [...]

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I was a big fan of Blake Snyder’s book, Save the Cat from the moment it first came out in 2005. Snyder’s blog was also one of the first blogs on screenwriting that I ever read, and he was encouraging to me when I launched the Screenwriting from Iowa blog in 2008. We’re into the eight month [...]

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Every writer is different in how they work, but in The 101 Habits of Highly Successful Screenwriters Karl Iglesias quotes three top screenwriters on how they handle the task of getting script pages done every day. Akiva Goldman: When I’m laying down the first draft, I try to write 10 pages per day, and then it’s [...]

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The truth is William Goldman wrote the first draft of script for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kidin just four weeks. He won an Oscar for his script.*  But that’s not the whole story if you factor in all the research he did on the outlaws: “When someone asks how long it takes to write [...]

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This is the kind of quote you expect to find on a blog titled Screenwriting from Iowa…and Other Unlikely Places: “I think all writers should have a voyeur nature. You have to look and listen. That’s why some writers might run out of material; they’re not looking, they’re not listening. I think the problem is [...]

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“I’m a dinosaur. The things that I’m trying to achieve are not things that are terribly valued in my business. The window of opportunity for the movies that interest me is literally getting narrower and narrower by the day. If I could be happy making comic book movies, my life would be a lot easier. [...]

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A Klingon stopped by River Run Productions yesterday. This is not an everyday occurrence in Cedar Falls, Iowa.                         On Monday, I shipped off a hard drive of footage for the largest client I’ve ever worked for, and Tuesday morning I got a call [...]

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“At each level you reach, you have to tear up what you have done before, which cost an enormous amount of psychological and emotional energy. That makes the process of screenwriting very, very difficult. And I don’t know any screenplay that I have ever worked on where I did not go through ten to twelve [...]

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If you were wondering why the daily posts last week seemed to come out only late at night, last week was one of those 80 work weeks. I was field producing for a national client with a nondisclosure form and all.  (I should check to see if I’m allowed to disclose that I signed a [...]

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“Ask yourself a most important question before you begin: What is about? I do not mean the plot, the arrangement of events, or eve the characters. I don’t mean who it’s about, but what’s it about. What are you saying in this story? What is your point of view? What is there about this story [...]

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