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Write From The Wound, Publish From the Scar

  • Holly Payberg-Torroija
  • .April 15, 2025
I attended a retreat facilitated by Elizabeth Gilbert and Rachel Cargle, and this was just one, of the many, important wisdom bombs Liz dropped on us at this wonderful 3 day retreat.   She said it in response to a question one of the participants asked: was it better to write from the wound or the scar? And I felt her answer was...
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Who is Your Favorite Antagonist and Why? Mine is Ted Lasso.

  • Holly Payberg-Torroija
  • .April 9, 2025
Of all your favorite books, shows and movies: who is your favorite Antagonist and why?  I know for some of you that this is like asking you to play favorites amongst your babies, but just pick the one that is striking you at the moment.  For me, my favorite Antagonist, at the moment, is Ted from Ted Lasso. I know some of you mig...
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9 Game-Changing Screenwriting Lessons

Everything in life has a pattern. So does a screenplay.Writing a screenplay (or a novel or anything else) can be a lot like trying to assemble IKEA furniture without the manual - frustrating, a little chaotic, and filled with moments where you genuinely wonder your purpose in life (and let’s face it, those IKEA manuals aren’t mu...
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5 Writer Hacks That Will Save Your Story

Screenwriting is an art, and it’s never easy. When we think it’s easy, we’re probably missing something. That’s not to say that it’s supposed to be hard just for hard’s sake (I mean…telling someone a story and actually making them feel something over the course of two hours or an entire season of TV is tricky business), but it i...
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‘Yes, And’-ing Your Story Into Existence: The Hunger Games Edition

When watching a movie or TV show, I’m always thinking about how and why a story works, and how and why the writer made those particular story choices. I’m also intrigued by how the concept began. How small was the kernel of the idea when they began to formulate the story and how did they go about expanding on the original premis...
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Ed Herro & Brian Donovan Make Mayhem, Murder & Maple Syrup In “The Sticky"

  • Staff Writer
  • .December 18, 2024
A story about a maple syrup heist may seem the stuff of wacky pulp fiction, but a notable heist did actually happen in Canada. It inspired a TV series from comedy writers Ed Herro and Brian Donovan (American Housewife) appropriately titled The Sticky. It stars Margot Martindale as Ruth Landry who gets herself into a sticky situa...
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Mike Schur Sends Ted Danson on Undercover Mission in “A Man on the Inside"

  • Staff Writer
  • .December 13, 2024
A Man On The Inside started as a 2020 documentary film by Maite Alberdi called The Mole Agent. It was an exposé of elder citizens’ abuses in nursing homes. Now a comedy television series starring Ted Danson as Charles, the amateur sleuth, his daughter Emily (Mary Elizabeth Ellis) seeking connection after the death of her mother ...
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Writing Exposition To Make Your Script Pop (Part 1)

Exposition is the beating heart of any story be it script, novel, song, article or poem. Building to a solid ending requires layering and delivering information in specific ways to make that ending work.But exposition isn’t just telling the audience something. It involves many aspects of a script – or any story for that matter. ...
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Wicked: An Adaptation Of An Adaptation Of An Adaptation

  • Staff Writer
  • .December 6, 2024
Victor Fleming and King Vidor made movie history when they made the timeless, inventive and fantastical The Wizard Of Oz in 1939. The spinoff film Wicked, based on the book series The Wicked Years by Gregory Maguire and a musical book by Winnie Holzman, was adapted into a hugely successful broadway musical in 2000, and is still ...
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A Look Inside the Christmas Movie

Because the holidays are upon us, I thought it would be fun to look at one of my favorite genres - The Christmas movie.I will start off by saying this: I do not agree that Die Hard is a Christmas movie. If you would like to stop reading right now because this tears a hole in your dark Christmas heart and makes you want to pull y...
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How Your Story's Theme Can Help You Develop Your Project

I think that we ignore the process of theme development in our projects mainly because we’ve never really been told how to define what theme really is, or how it can inform more than just meaning and sentiment.I gave this note to one of my writers this week (with regard to her thematic statement): “…I think there is a lot to say...
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Writing Effective Found Family Films: Part 2

This entry is part 2 of 2 in the series "Found Family."It’s A DisasterNothing forces people to form a family faster than a disaster – a plane crash, shipwreck, or a natural disaster such as an earthquake, tidal wave, or tornado. Yellowjackets tells the story of a girls soccer team whose plane crashes in the wilderness during a f...
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Writing Effective Found Family Films: Part 1

This entry is part 1 of 2 in the series "Found Family."Found Family films are not new, but you may not have explicitly heard the term before. It simply means a film featuring groups of people who are not genetically or legally related and joined by circumstances to try and accomplish a common story goal by the end. These movies ...
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Goals: Driving the Narrative

  • James "Doc" Mason
  • .November 19, 2024
As with every story element described in this series, the goal relates directly back to the idea of conflict. To reiterate, in its most basic form, conflict is when someone wants something and another person doesn’t want them to have it.More specifically, narrative conflict is typically when one character proactively pursues a g...
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11 Writing Quotes You Should Take Notice Of (Part 1)

This entry is part 1 of 2 in a series on Writing Quotes.By the time any writer becomes successful, they’ve typically gathered a war chest worth of things not to do. If one is doing it right, you’re writing, reading, listening, and learning a ton of how to and not to write.Let’s see what lessons successful writers have learned.1)...
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So You Finished a Draft... Now What?

RewritingIt’s something we all need to deal with, and there is no getting around it. Rewriting, rewriting, rewriting. In the last post, I talked about writer’s block and, well, how and why writer’s block is pretty much a whole bunch of bullshit, and to again quote Terry Pratchett, “something invented by people in California who ...
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Are Your Scenes Boring? 8 Ways To Change That

  • Staff Writer
  • .November 6, 2024
Nothing makes a reader’s mind wander faster than a boring scene which makes them lose interest in your screenplay and scroll or flip through your pages without actively reading or engaging with them. Here are some creative ways to identify and even rectify that:1) Character StereotypesThe characters are a carbon copy of what aud...
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Writing Morally Gray Characters, Part 2

This article is a continuation of Writing Morally Gray Characters, Part 1. Politics Is A Dirty Gray“Politics is a dirty business, but if you do not do politics, politics will be done to you.” So states novelist Will Shetterly.Many movies and TV series about politics shows the absolute compromising nature of politics. Gray charac...
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Writing Morally Gray Characters, Part 1

When you speak of gray in life, you’re normally talking about a mainly colorless tapestry. But morally gray characters, those considered not good nor bad, neither heroes not villains, are some of the more complex characters you can write. Even more interesting, is a psychological phenomenon that allows our audiences to embrace a...
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"How JT Mollner Used 'Halloween' to Inspire Horror Film 'Strange Darling'"

  • Staff Writer
  • .October 21, 2024
“Strange Darling came to me through an initial image that I saw of a woman running through the woods in distress,” says JT Mollner of his horror film that can be described as a mix of a bloody popcorn wild ride and art.“I’ve read countless stories about serial killers which gave me some inspiration to show a different side of th...

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