Characters

• Creating Characters That Jump Off the Page ( Creating characters that live to an audience; Ways to make your characters believable…)
• Name-Dropping (A name is like a tightly-wound DNA molecule, capable of conveying information about characterization, tone, stoy…)
• The Audience is Listening (Relationship Between Audience and Protagonist. Relationship Between Audience and Story…)
• First Appearances (When it comes to introducing characters in a scene for the first time, my beginning screenwriting students…) Conflict in Genre: Not Just the Bad Guy
  
• How Do Screenwriters Construct Three-Dimensional Characters (How does a writer know if the characters feel real…)
• Character Growth: Change, Maturing (The character must change, and should do so gradually from scene one to the ending scene…)
• Beginning Screenwriting: The Villain (The villain, or antagonist, is the catalyst to all conflict needed in your screenplay…)
  
• Beginning Screenwriting: The Inner Villain (Exploring and drawing out the inner villain is a very difficult and exhausting process…)

Dialogue

• How To Write Successful Dialogue (Writing dialogue is just as simple as writing the way people talk, right? Actually, no…)
• How To Make Dialogue Work Harder (Below are some suggestions of ways you can use dialogue to give your fiction more impact…)
• Dialogue Workshop (There are many dialogue pitfalls, but most of them can be solved through patience, editing…)
• Subtext: What Characters Don’t Tell Us (Subtext is the unspoken thoughts and motives of your characters – what they think and believe)
• Writing Out Loud: How a reading can benefit your screenplay (Arranging a reading will bring out the very worst in your script…)
• The Mystery of Subtext (You ask a screenwriting teacher about subtext and you’ll get a vague answer that will leave you confused…)

Story Genre

• Genres (Expressionism; Surrealism; Neorealism; Abstract Expresionism; Neo-Expressionism; Nouvelle Vague; Improvisation…)
• Genre FAQ (Formats, genre, structure…How long do you think the typical learning curve is for an aspiring screenwriter?…)
• Movie Genres (Choosing the right blend of genres is vital to the success of your story and ultimately your screenplay…)
• How to Write for Animation (As the name implies, this column is about writing; specifically, animation writing…)
• Why Police Stories? (The audience of a police story can engage emotionally in the story through a variety of characters and issues…)
• Anatomy of an Action Adventure (Action adventure movies have long been a staple for movie-goers. They meet a need for thrills…)
• TV Writer FAQ (For several months, my writing and my meetings went nowhere, but, fortunately, I was too young to despair…)
• Romantic Comedy Writing Secrets (We go into a romantic comedy already knowing that our leads are going to meet, lose and…)
• Writing For Television (A television series is almost never the product of one writer locked in a room, banging out pages…)
• Can Anyone Write a Teen Movie (The older the writer, the more difficulty they have writing true to life young characters…)
• Lessons for Writers: Military Movies (The next series of articles are on the writer and the war movie…)
• Angels, Aliens and Altered States (The supernatural and the unexplained are all the rage now, from channeling spirit guides for …)

Script Format

• Anatomy Of An Irresistible Query Letter (The query letter is a marketing tool that can get your script read and you recognized in…)
• How To Get Your Script Slammed Shut, Or, What Price Obscurity? (Getting their script slammed shut isn’t, for most writers, its own en)
• Breaking the Ice ( know writers who say they’ve gone their whole careers without once writing a query letter to anyone….)
• 23 Steps to a Feature Film Sale (Screenwriters need to get into the game, if for no other reason that they can afford to quit their jobs…)
• Death To Readers (And as a reader, you quickly recognize some key patterns. Like all scripts with fancy covers are bad…)
• To be (represented) or not to be (represented)…that is the question (producers and directors kept telling me that I ‘needed’ an agent…)
• You, the Expert (agents are all searching for the next highly-trained, yet unknown, screenwriter… not for any of the highly-known…)
• A Foot In the Door (As a screenwriter, your choice of film premise is your calling card. Not your witty dialog, not clever descriptions…)
• The Wind-up and the Pitch (We learned our ‘board’ pitching style from how they do it at Disney feature animation…)
• Writing a Story Synopsis (A one-page story synopsis that accurately reflects the issues at stake in a story is valuable when…)
• Proper Treatment (Often the treatment becomes a way to present your best ideas in the poorest possible forum…)
• Hard Bargain (This is the column your agent doesn’t want you to read…)
• Your First Contract (No matter how helpful industry professionals try to be, in books and interviews and seminars and such…)
• Overcoming the Fear of Writing a Synopsis (Describe Your Story in 25 Words or Less…)
• Risk vs. Reward (There are, in fact, two ways a writer can actually earn a paycheck in this town…)
• Dump Trucks and Screenplays (the scripts would slide down into the mailroom were an army of workers would begin the triage…)
• The Anatomy of a Logline (What we have above is essentially the spine of the story — the sentence the entire movie hangs on…)
• Breaking Down The Hollywood Wall… With Power Tools (When I approached my first agent, I was bubbling over with the knowledge)
• The Hollywood Hustle (You have much less control [in film] because when you write a movie you’re an employee…)
• Getting to Hollywood Via the Indies (By definition, “indies” are companies that raise their own capital in order to produce…)
• A Few Thought on Treatments (The best treatments are those that eschew dry “this happens then that happens”…)
• Getting Representation (Persistence is BY FAR your best friend. It is absolutely irreplaceable…)
• Trailerized Scripts – the Latest Marketing Tool (The process of creating and using a “Trailerized Script” for marketing came to me…)
• Is That Hollywood Calling (”What kind of scripts is Hollywood buying these days? Do I have to move to LA to be a successful writer?…)
• Sell Your Screenplays (Where should you submit your screenplay? To a studio like Disney, Columbia, or 20th Century Fox?…)
• It’s the Pitch, Stupid!: An Interview With Robert Kosberg (writer or producer meets with studio executives and in the shortest amount…)
• The Dreaded Art of Pitching (Pitching (ie: a verbal sales presentation of your project) has become yet another needed skill for writers…)

Entertainment Licensing & Branding

• Playdigm