From Elizabeth Hunter:
I used to write from a very cerebral place. Now I write from a very emotional place and that’s really helped me a lot with my female characters. And it’s helped my career a lot because people want to play they want to play emotion. So I do the cerebral thing first, you know make sure the structure works because that’s always the first thing they’re going to call you on.
They’re going to say wow what happened to the end of act 1? They’re always going to call you out on that so just don’t take that off the table. Just make sure your structure is sound and then you can play and have fun and create the complex characters but make sure that the journey makes sense.
From Stephen Harrigan:
I think the hardest work in screenwriting is structure and that’s what we as writers tend to want to avoid as long as possible because it’s difficult and we often try to write our way through the movie before we’ve had a chance to think about what the movie is about or why we’re writing it. So, I think if you go into a scene with…a clear understanding of what that scene has to accomplish for your overall purpose it just makes your life much easier.
From Bill Witliff:
I’ve never paid any attention to that [structure]…When people in Hollywood read my screenplays, and they say, “Well, here is the end of Act 2,” I never know where the end of Act 2 is. But I know that out there, they want theme, they want all these mechanical things, and I basically have no interest in writing my steps and rules except in ways of structure. Though I do think that storytelling is now and has always been a certain thing, which is, “This happens, and then this happens, and then this happens, but then this happens;” that storytelling has to have some sort of dynamic…to involve the viewer, the listener, and the reader, and I think it works because it’s all in us. I mean, it’s not like the storyteller’s saying, “Here’s how you listen to a story,” you just tell a story and people know. It’s just innate.