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Monday, February 24, 2014

Short stories

Saturday, February 22, 2014

Oscar Nominated Screenplays

Check out: http://www.studiodaily.com/2014/01/read-the-oscar-nominated-screenplays-and-more-scripts-from-2013-films/

Sunday, February 2, 2014

Stroy story and story!

Here is another loooong rant on stories... Tell me what you think...

Types of Stories:
As you know there are many types of stories. Michael Rabigar's book had a list of 36 stories.
Here is another take on the types of stories:
Raising the stakes:
We often hear writers and books on writing talk about “raising the stakes,” but what does that really mean? Raising the stakes simply means making things worse for your characters.

This is what I could figureout from my readings.
There’s a very simple formula for creating the stakes (and thus suspense) in your story: Show your reader something she wants, and then threaten it.

Here are some ways to elevate suspense in your story:
  1. Establish What’s at Stake
  2. Emphasize the Or-Else Factor
  3. Create a Ticking Time Bomb
  4. Create suspense by exposing only a portion of teh info
  5. Create a puzzle
Finding out what your character wants and why will help determine your external and internal conflict and offer insight into how to raise the stakes.
There are three aspects of stakes that you should consider ie think up of trouble on all 3 fronts:
  1. What’s the worst thing that can happen to the lead?
  2. How to cause deeply personal or emotional anguish to lead or the one lead cares about? Or are there dark secrets from past
  3. What are the social aspects or new characters can upset the balance?
Resolving the stakes in an entertaining manner is what makes your stories interesting and original.

Ending:
  •  Climax: You must create a climactic incident that surpasses any other incident in the novel in terms of action, conflict, imagery and dialogue. Blow your readers away with the height and depths of the emotions you achieve. Leave them feeling disadvantaged that they might never meet your heroic character again.
  • Twist: The ending has to be completely unexpected and turns the whole story on its head, often revealing that an assumed truth throughout the story was actually false.
  • Tie-Back: Your ends should not introduce anyting new or leave out questions unanswered. Everything that happens in ending should have been set up earlier in the story. To make it artistic and more appealing the ending has to tie right back to the beginning; using the same dialogue, description, setting or idea. It creates a feeling of balance and completeness.

Does the heroic character learn an important lesson? Your hero’s scars cost him something, but he
also wears them like badges of learning. Make sure to leave your characters with reasonable, justifyiable emotional/physical scars and/or losses. Audiance who walk away from the movie unimpressed will kill you in the word-of-mouth department.

See here for 5 possible ways in which a story can end:

Why write a story before making a movie?

I have seen and heard that producers and studios prefer to invest in a movie if the story is based on a published book. Why? To avoid or minimize the copyright wars. So if you want to make a book first then consider self publishing. But then it writing a whole story and to have it published in itself is a whole new ball game. Anyway to publish your story yourself here are some pointers:
Read http://www.wikihow.com/Self-Publish-a-Book too; it has some nice tips.
 
Do you know of any other ways to avoid or minimize copyright wars and to entyce producers/studios?