What goes into writing a great movie script?

Outline everything. Use story beats. Keep character’s mouths taped up, until they absolutely MUST speak. Write the script and the dialogue at the last minute, after you’ve revised the hell out of the outline.

Your primary job is to create situations. Modern actors will fuck up your dialogue, despite whatever your contract says.

Use status to help drive conflict. King Lear/fool. Upstairs/downstairs.

Aut adipisci dolorum ut aliquam consequuntur quas.

A critical function of storytelling is wish fulfillment. This is why video games are so popular. “That protagonist is JUST LIKE ME.”

Conflict is your power source; without it you have no drama and hence no script.

Only God gets it right the first time. Rewrite everything.

Why is rap* a crime?

The DSM 5 is a wonderful character compendium.

People choose what to see based on the high concept. Make sure to deliver an ending consistent with the high concept -- it is what the audience paid for.

All rules are made to be broken, but you damn well better know WHY you’re breaking them.

Turning the Red Planet green? It's time to take terraforming Mars seriously, scientists say - Space

To develop a unique voice for each character, try interviewing your characters.

A scene should change valence from beginning to end. Up to down, down to up.

Actors give better feedback than writers do.

New evidence suggests cosmic expansion may reverse and cause the Universe to implode in a spectacular finale - BBC Sky at Night Magazine

Write in reverse time. Major characters need to change polarity; minor characters may remain the same at the end.

Maintain a slush pile/idea file. When you are ready to write, choose the best seeds to plant.

Primary characters must change polarities. Secondary characters can change less.

Apple details the end of Intel Mac support and a phaseout for Rosetta 2 - Ars Technica

Make sure to pack enough explosives into the rocket.

Audiences are smarter than you think. Something about turning down the house lights makes their IQs go up.

What you leave unwritten is as important as what you write. SUBTEXT.

How is it, in the USA, a country with 334 million people, the choice of President comes down to two aged men, one of whom is a liar as well as a criminal, one who appears to be on his way to dementia. Surely a democratic country can put up better?

Learn to tell a story orally and not through writing. Try telling your story to a friend.

Get up there yourself. Be in a movie. Take some acting (not writing) classes. Learn how a trained actor approaches a text. Learn why actors take roles. They do as much if not more than the writer does.

Leave holes. Write and unwrite. Put it in, take it out.

What does it mean when a British person says "I can't be asked"?

Cut everything that is not a payoff, or a setup for a specific payoff. “Omit needless words.” Think about the sparseness of joke telling, or Grimm Brothers.

Don’t direct from the page. Everyone, from the director on down, wants to be part of the process of making movies. Let them do their work.

Research the facts and then throw away the research.

Am I the bitch for never wanting to talk to my sister again because of something she said while talking back to me?