Writing for emotional impact by Karl Iglesias

[irenegro]

Полное название книги - Writing for emotional impact Advanced Dramatic Techniques to Attract, Engage, and Fascinate the Reader from Beginning to End.

Уже на первых страницах автор заботливо предупреждает читателей, что не стоит браться за эту книгу, если вы любите смотреть кино, а то вам откроются такие тайны, и такая изнанка процесса, что вы будете знать слишком много, и все это will demystify what you see on the screen.

И ведь не обманул. Действительно в книге много очень полезных советов по написанию киносценариев (кстати, многие из них вполне годятся и для написания любых художественных книг). Рекомендуется не просто прочитать ее как пособие и отложить в сторону, но держать в качестве настольной и обращаться к ней как можно чаще.



Alfred Hitchcock, the master of suspense and audience manipulation, once said to writer Ernest Lehman, while they were filming North by Northwest, “We’re not making a movie; we’re making an organ, like in a church. We press this chord, the audience laughs. We press that chord, and they gasp. We press these notes and they chuckle. Someday, we won’t have to make a movie. We’ll just attach them to electrodes and play the various emotions for them to experience in the theatre.”

**
Hollywood buys and sells emotional experiences. Therefore, if you want to become a successful screenwriter you must create emotional experiences in your scripts.

**
“Art is fire plus algebra.” –Jorge Luis Borges

**
If you love the “magic” of movies, put this book back on the shelf. This book offers advanced techniques that will demystify what you see on the screen.

**
Ernest Hemingway once said, “When you first start writing, you never fail. You think it’s wonderful. You think it’s easy to write and you enjoy it very much, but you’re thinking of yourself, not the reader. He doesn’t enjoy it very much. Later, when you have learned to write for the reader, it’s no longer easy to write.”

**
Writers who write by instinct, who know what works and what doesn’t because they have,
as Hemingway says, “a built-in shit detector.”

**
“Always grab the reader by the throat in the first paragraph, send your thumbs into his
windpipe in the second, and hold him against the wall until the tagline.” –Paul O’Neil

**
“A movie is a success or failure from the moment you solidify your сoncept. Execution is fifty percent. It is the primal attachment to the concept that makes the movie work or not.”
–George Lucas

**
Most screenwriting students are no doubt aware of Jeffrey Katzenberg’s internal memo to executives while he was at Disney. It’s quoted in many screenwriting books and seminars because it preaches the following: “In the dizzying world of movie making, we must not be distracted from one fundamental concept: the idea is king. If a movie begins with a great, original idea, chances are good it will be successful, even if it is executed only marginally well. However, if a film begins with a flawed idea, it will almost certainly fail, even if it is made with ‘A’ talent and marketed to the hilt.” The Los Angeles Times also quoted Katzenberg a few years ago, when he said, “Hollywood is about the marriage of art and commerce—with the accent on commerce. European filmmaking is about art. Period.”

**

12 ways to increase your idea’s appeal
1. Find the unique hook in your story.
2. What’s the worst thing that happens to your
character?
3. Contrast characters (odd couples).
4. Contrast environment and character (fish out of
water).
5. Add a second idea to the mix.
6. Change traditional story elements.
7. Reverse predictable plots.
8. Create an interesting inciting event.
9. Take it to the extreme–the ultimate (blank) from hell.
10. Emphasize or add a time limit.
11. Emphasize a setting, arena, world (behind the scenes).
12. Make the concept an interesting dilemma.

**
“Art is a microscope which the artist fixes on the secrets of his soul and shows to people these secrets which are common to all.”
-Leo Tolstoy

**
Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth. -Albert Camus
**

“The whole thing is you’ve got to make them care about somebody.”
-Frank Capra

**

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.”
-Robert Frost

**
“Screenwriting is like fashion. All clothes have the same structure. A
shirt has two sleeves and buttons, but not all shirts look alike.”
-Akiva Goldsman

**
“Screenplays are carefully written and ordered in such a way that the audience has no choice but to feel exactly what the writers want them to feel.”
-F. Scott Fitzgerald

**

“Good dialogue illuminates what people are not saying.”
-Robert Towne

**
Well-crafted dialogue sells scripts, and it sells the writer. Talented scribes who excel in this area are highly sought-after to the tune of six figures per week for dialogue rewrites.
That said, however, dialogue is not as important as character development or structure because you’re not writing a play. Screenwriting is mostly about what you see, not hear. You’re writing motion pictures, not visual radio. Silent movies were doing fine without much dialogue for twenty years before sound changed the industry. William Goldman says that dialogue “is among the least important parts of a screenplay… if movies are story, and they are, then screenplays are structure.” Alfred Hitchcock said, “Once the picture is set, we add the dialogue.”

**
Director John Lee Hancock once said, “Good actors want fewer words, and bad actors want more words.”

**
In John Brady’s book The Craft of the Screenwriter, Paddy Chayefsky offers the following advice for crafting great dialogue: “I write laboriously worked-out dialogue… because I know what I want my characters to say. I envision the scene; I can imagine them up there on the screen; I try to imagine what they would say and how they would say it, and keep it in character. And the dialogue comes out of that. I think that goes for every writer in the world. Then I rewrite it. Then I cut it. Then I refine it until I get the scene as precisely as I can get it.”

**
Write it, rewrite it, cut it, hone it, refine it, and polish it until it shines enough to
blind the reader.

**
“I hear and I forget; I see and I remember; I do and I understand.”
-Chinese Proverb