# Read

The limited series really must be considered long-from filmmaking, a brilliant hybrid of the best of the big and small screens.

The life of a novelist is a very solitary endeavor. You engage the blank page on your own ... But in order for it to become a commercial product that is going to reach a wider audience, there has to be collaboration there.

Am I the only one who finds it a wee bit unhealthy we are expected to lay bare our most intimate struggles just to force a bunch of strangers to feel something?

John Bucher discusses story’s past, present, and future with the man who literally wrote the book on the subject: Robert McKee.

Remember that your reel isn’t the full conversation—it’s the start of one.

In writing, I am every character's voice—even the location's.

It felt selfish and tone deaf to be scratching out a screenplay of all things while the world was falling apart.

I didn’t talk about that because I was terrified that any artistic input that I might say … would end up diverting the course of this script one or two degrees from its true North and then it ends up in a deal that doesn’t get done.

There are no picket fences high enough, no hill too steep for your fresh heart.

As a screenwriter, you can’t just ask an audience to go along with anything, you have to meet them halfway.

"If you want to get better odds of selling a spec, write a role that could change a movie star’s life." - Ian Shorr

Just as one falling domino will topple another, before long I was taking part in all sorts of high-octane adventures ... when editors had a story idea that could get a journalist maimed or killed, I was the first scribe they pitched.

If you’re trying to figure out how to make your horror script work, you’ve probably read the scripts of writing team Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan. And if you haven’t, you need to.

The most constructive filmmaker for learning screenwriting for me was Terrence Malick. To anybody who knows what any of that means, it might sound like an oxymoron.

I cherish the couple of hours in a theater when the phones are silenced, the lights are dimmed, and you’re completely immersed into another person’s world.