Don’t Rescue your Characters
When we rescue our characters, we think we’re being kind to the characters, and to the audience, who we hope also love our characters. What we’re actually doing is [...]
Make your Audience Come Looking
Don’t Explain, Reveal. And sometimes, Withhold. This essay builds directly on the principle explored in Don’t Explain, Reveal — that explanation weakens engagement, while discovery strengthens it. Here, [...]
Duelling Aphorisms and Double-Sided Questions
How to design subplots that actively explore a story’s philosophical question. The Second Act Challenge Writing the second act of a story is often the writer’s biggest [...]
Don’t Explain, Reveal
Don’t explain your story, reveal it and let the audience work things out for themselves. Aleksey Popogrebiskiy’s 2010 film, “How I Ended This Summer”, opens with [...]
Dump the Ducky
Resist the urge to explain and sentimentalise. Contemporary drama often works hard to reassure us that a flawed character is not evil — that their [...]
Externalise the Last Step
A character’s personal integration, the moment when they finally become whole, is not the end of the story. Until they put the change into action, it’s only theoretical. [...]
Give your Subconscious a Playground
For each project, give yourself an imaginary playground in a secret Imagination Book. Messy, private, driven by freedom and obstacles. When you start a project, buy [...]
Goody-Two-Shoes Dialogue
If a scene only works when someone explains it, the problem started pages ago. Dialogue isn’t the solution you need Dialogue is the goody-two-shoes in [...]
Morality, not Moralism
The best stories work on many levels. Morality is almost always one of them — but morality, not moralism. There’s a difference between making a [...]
Creating the Illusion of Insight
How to write a script that creates the illusion of an inner life through cinematic language and neutral performance. Audiences create subtext when the author [...]
