# Style & Substance

When was the last time you had fun—real fun—at the movies? Beginning-to-end, clapping at the screen, whooping along with the audience, goosebump-raising FUN.

Sticking the landing of a script is tricky. It can’t be too predictable, yet it needs to feel wholly appropriate, justifiable, and even inevitable in its way.

One has to hand it to a show like Severance as it’s not only chock full of metaphors about the dumbing down of America and the corruption of information sharing, but it's doing so on a platform run by those they are critiquing.

Without me even realizing, Emma Thompson had been guiding my ship the moment I put pen to paper. I couldn’t ask for a better teacher.

An excess of emotions can also mean that your ability to think clearly and logically about your script is impaired.

So much of what you adore when you read or watch is the result of an author, screenwriter, actor, director, stepping out onto a limb and offering you more.

Clearly there is a knowledge gap out there … there’s something that a hell of a lot of writers out there need to know, and they don’t know it right now.

But for our other mediums we must travel to what some cynics describe as the least truthful place of all—Hollywood.

If cultural connection, curiosity, and interrogation is some bedrock to our interest in, and fondness for the genre, what else draws audiences so endlessly to these films?

If a writer is going to present his POV in those big, neon letters, becoming almost strident in his or her moral clarity, then one should hope to be as clever as Sorkin.

Let women be women, let mothers be badass. Let us fight! You won’t be disappointed.

It’s almost like I’ve got a blank page on which to write this new entity from scratch. Similar to creating a character for a screenplay.

It's more valuable that you know how people answer their own questions without your input, since you won't always be in the room when audiences experience your work.

Unless you’re writing only for you, you need to keep the audience in mind. Especially if that audience is the gatekeeper to all your hopes and dreams.

When Spike Scarberry threw down the gauntlet, insisting structure was more important than voice, Karin Partin Wells raised her hand to battle in a public debate.