One of the greatest challenges for writers of any skill level is to realistically portray how characters with very different points of view act under pressure and - most importantly - how they interact with each other under that pressure. It’s hard enough to cook up vibrant, well-motivated characters, but it’s even more difficult to create believable chemistry between them.

During the early stages of your development as a screenwriter, I believe you should be reading as much as you write. Read stories similar to the ones you want to write and see how other, successful writers have solved screenwriting problems similar to the ones you want to tackle.

One of the most common requests I get from people is to provide them with the average number of scenes/pages/sequences per screenplay so that they can gauge whether or not what they are writing is completely out of whack or falls in line with the rest of the industry. These numbers have now been updated with 2019 information compiled by stevenfollows.com after researching over twelve thousand scripts.

Screenwriting contests are not a one-size-fits-all affair.

While there are obvious benefits to winning a huge and prestigious competition like the Nicholl Fellowships, smaller contests can be just as valuable if they hook you up with a judge who wants to option your screenplay, or a manager who wants to represent your work.

“Copyright is a property right that arises initially from authorship alone.

In Canada, formal registration is not required. An author has copyright in any original literary work, whether or not it is published, except in some cases where the author has been employed to write the work.

This is a ridiculously big list of every genre and sub-genre I can think of. I have no idea where the original list came from. I’ve been adding to this for years and it has now grown out-of-control into something far too big to manage, but I do want to make it available to you so that you can see just how many variations there are out there.

So... you’ve done all the work and you’ve created a really solid script with market potential. Now what? Well, now you need to draw some attention to it. You need to start submitting it to contests, sending it to producers, executives, production companies, and... most importantly…

My goal here is to assemble a comprehensive and useful dictionary/glossary that anyone can reference when they need help. This is all standard industry vernacular everyone interested in screenwriting should be familiar with.

Writing credits matter. It can help get you into the WGA (Writer’s Guild of America)or WGC (Writer’s Guild of Canada), it affects residuals, and the more produced credits you get, the better it looks on your resume. But there is a slight complication with writing credits. There are a few different kinds and they all mean different things, so here’s a quick “screenwriting credits 101” to explain the differences.

If your story is wonderful, then the reader may overlook little formatting problems. Then again, the reader may never read your script if he or she is turned off by those “little formatting problems” when he or she glances through your script. Obviously, the story is the most important thing, but formatting is also important. In marketing, we call this packaging. Packaging is important in selling the product—your script.