[Watch the video interview on Youtube here]
Film Courage: What confuses a new screenwriter the most?
Daniel Calvisi, Script Doctor, Writing Coach and Author: I think its voice on the page. It is selecting a word choice that captures tone and style and developing their original voice on the page. It’s a big thing, it is not totally quantifiable. You can’t really teach someone their voice. It’s literally which words do you choose in a description paragraph to capture the moment? I think new writers don’t quite get:
-How important tone is
-How important it is to capture the style/tone of a moment of an individual scene or even just a second of screen time
They should think as if they’re watching that movie or TV show at that moment, what would the audience feel in that moment? Then try and recreate that with words on the page. It might apply to:
-Paragraph breaks
-Punctuation might help
-White space versus text
Everything adds up to creating the tone of that particular scene and the pace and the style. You can’t fully teach that but I can give them enough notes and even edits and I can say Here’s how you might rewrite this description, maybe if you were use a word that’s…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
About:
DANIEL P. CALVISI is a Script Doctor, Writing Coach and the author of Story Maps: How to Write a GREAT Screenplay and Story Maps: TV DRAMA: The Structure of the One-Hour Television Pilot. He is a former Story Analyst for major studios like Twentieth Century Fox, Miramax Films and New Line Cinema. He coaches writers, teaches webinars on writing for film and television and speaks at writing conferences. Many of his clients have worked with the top networks and studios in the industry, such as Netflix, HBO, Warner Brothers, Disney, Sony, ABC, Showtime, Apple TV+ and more. He holds a degree in Film and Television from New York University. He lives in Los Angeles.
MORE VIDEOS WITH DANIEL CALVISI
BUY THE BOOK – STORY MAPS: How To Write A GREAT Screenplay
http://amzn.to/2hcbRwS
BUY THE BOOK – STORY MAPS: TV Drama: The Structure of the One-Hour Television Pilot (Volume 4)
CONNECT WITH DANIEL CALVISI
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