Writing for a living is a business. In business, time is money. As a writer, if you’re able to increase your hourly output without sacrificing quality, you’re increasing your potential income. How to Writer Faster Than Anyone Better, and Better Than Anyone Faster by Kerry Cox is a practical, immediately actionable guide for aspiring, semi-professional, and professional writers who want to optimize their $/TSW: Dollars per Time Spent Writing. You’ll learn to view each writing assignment as ...

SUCCESSFUL SCRIPTWRITINGLet's start with "The End." The credits roll - we see "Screenplay by ..." and there's your name. The show's a hit! It's Emmy/Oscar night, and you're seated up front. The nominations are revealed; your name is called. Your acceptance speech is memorable, an inspiration to the new writers "breaking in." Variety says your "future looks very bright." Hooray for Hollywood! But how did you get here?With talent, determination, and ...

From the author of 1,000 Creative Writing Prompts, this 300 page, 150,000+ word reference tool can serve writers who need characters and need them now!If character development is your problem, this detailed reference tool for any writer is the solution. Imagine if every time you sat down to brainstorm for your stories, scripts and more, you had a notebook full of character ideas ready to spring to life on the page. This time-saving, idea-generating tome can ensure that from protago...

Making readers care and feel like they’re part of the story should be the number one goal of all writers. Ironically, many storytellers fail to maximize one of fiction’s most powerful elements to achieve this: the setting. Rather than being a simple backdrop against which events unfold, every location has the potential to become a conduit for conveying emotion, characterizing the cast, providing opportunities for deep point of view, and revealing significant backstory.Inside Th...

"Began to read 'Monte Cristo' at six one morning and never stopped till eleven at night." —William Makepeace Thackeray "Alexandre Dumas is more than French, he is European; he's more than European, he is universal." —Victor Hugo "No novelist since Dumas has been more irreverent of the conventions of well-made fiction or any more determined to tell stories without identifiable centers." —Terrence Rafferty Set against the turbulent years of the Napoleonic era, Alexandre Dumas's thrilling adv...

Techniques of the Selling Writer provides solid instruction for people who want to write and sell fiction, not just to talk and study about it. It gives the background, insights, and specific procedures needed by all beginning writers. Here one can learn how to group words into copy that moves, movement into scenes, and scenes into stories; how to develop characters, how to revise and polish, and finally, how to sell the product.No one can teach talent, but the practical s...

Discover the Difference Between a So-So Manuscript and a Novel Readers Can't ForgetWe've all read them: novels by our favorite authors that disappoint. Uninspired and lifeless, we wonder what happened. Was the author in a hurry? Did she have a bad year? Has he lost interest altogether?Something similar is true of a great many unpublished manuscripts. They are okay stories that never take flight. They don't grip the imagination, let alone the heart. They mer...

Story loves structure...and so do readers!Super Structure represents over two decades of research on what makes a novel or screenplay entertaining, commercial, original, and irresistible. Contrary to what some may think, structure is not a nasty inhibitor of creativity. Quite the opposite. Properly understood and utilized, structure is what translates story into a form readers are wired to receive it.And it is only when readers truly connect with your story...

Craft your fiction with scene-by-scene flow, logic and readability.An imprisoned man receives an unexpected caller, after which "everything changed..."And the reader is hooked. But whether or not readers will stay on for the entire wild ride will depend on how well the writer structures the story, scene by scene.This book is your game plan for success. Using dozens of examples from his own work - including Dropshot,Tiebreaker and o...

EPISODE III–THE ONE AND ONLY OFFICIAL SCREENPLAY, available exclusively in ebook format, including scenes that did not appear in the movie itself!This is the complete, final screenplay written by George Lucas, as brought to life before the cameras by a stellar cast of performers and an unparalleled team of special effects wizards.Enjoy a rare and fascinating director’s-eye-view of all the action, all the legendary characters, and each of the exotic...

Many writers have heard of hooks, and have heard we should use them in our manuscripts as a tool to engage readers and keep them engaged, but what we’re not told is how to identify what a hook is or where to use them to maximize them other than in that key opening line.In this book we’ll look at five specific types of hooks. There are more, but these are the most common, and the most universal, which means by understanding how to craft them, most readers will respon...

The Hollywood Standard describes in clear, vivid prose and hundreds of examples how to format every element of a screenplay or television script. A reference for everyone who writes for the screen, from the novice to the veteran, this is the dictionary of script format, with instructions for formatting everything from the simplest master scene heading to the most complex and challenging musical underwater dream sequence. This new edition includes a quick start guide, plus new chapters on a...