North Americans Don't Read?

That was an 'arguement' in one of the writing forums I frequent, as an explanation of why some poorly written books do well.

Non Sequiter much? Besides being not true?

Were that actually the case, there would be few bookstores, and certainly no large chains. The other 'basis' for this arguement were that people only read bestsellers, and they only read those to appear informed on whatever is popular at the time.

Purple monkey dishwasher??? (Simpsons reference)

Did it not occur to this person that the 'bestseller' label comes AFTER selling oodles of copies? So who were the tens of thousands who bought the book before it became popular? Couldn't have been all those non readers following trends.

Yes, some poorly written books have flash in the pan wild success. Some wonderful books languish in obscurity - but most often, those truly good books have something the others don't:

Staying power. They sit patiently on the shelves, in print year after year, growing followers and appreciation.

Which would I rather have?

I can't deny the attraction of insta-fame and money. Ideally, both. But what I'd honestly rather have, is a growing career. Well written books that trickle through society, staying in print for decades due to regular demand. Fans that will buy the next book, and the next one.

But that doesn't happen, because Americans don't read. Hear that, Umberto Eco? How about Peter S. Beagle? You guys CAN'T exist, those sturdy, eternally popular writers - because no one reads what they don't hear about on tv.

Sheesh.

Article about scam publisher

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/business/20070909-9999-lz1b9crabtree.html

It also has a pretty good list of 'red flags' to watch out for during your research.

As always, best on your adventures!

Publishing takes FOREVER, don't panic.

I didn't exactly panic, but I'd given up on a submission - one of Shroud magazine's Arkham Tales anthologies - horror poetry in a Lovecraftian vein.

Since I wasn't too invested in the piece (I shot together the poem in fifteen minutes, specifically for that submission - thanks again to the kind person who made me aware of it in the first place) it was a bit easier not to obsessively check my email for updates.

I completely understand the compulsion - try not to do it. Forget about the submission, work on something else.

After not hearing for a month, I was a little disappointed. Shrug, and move on. About a week later, I got an email asking if I was willing to edit the poem structurally - the editor didn't seem to care for the quatrains, and wanted to break them into random pieces.

Personally, I felt that it weakened the piece - but at my stage in the game, I felt that being easy to work with and willing to compromise is important. You may feel differently, and that's fine. Artistic integrity is a funny thing, and the line for each person is different.

What I did, was break the poem up three or four different ways, mentioned how it seemed to weaken the rhyming and the rhythm, and said I'd love to see how he (the editor) saw it being broken up, because I couldn't see how it would work.

Then I spent a few days worrying about being presumptuous, obsessively refreshing my email, and hoping that I hadn't inadvertently pissed someone off.

Two more months go by. I figure I must have annoyed someone, get a little down, and forget about it for a while. (Where else would I be able to submit a poem so specific?)

Then, I get an email informing me that I've made the first round of cuts, the editor is going on vacation, and will be in touch in September.

WOOHOOO!!!!! (For those who don't know, Shroud is a pro-rate paying publication, and counts toward membership in the Horror Writers of America.)

And more waiting, but I feel better about it now.

Look at it this way - four or five months of waiting, just to this point. Publishing takes an eternity, so don't sweat it, and keep working on something else, or you'll drive yourself nuts with the wait.

Beating the slushpile? Not so much

All those 'change the face of publishing' sites that offer to 'show your work to real publishers'?

I've been hearing about Authonomy ad nauseum lately, so I decided to do a little homework.

Click the title for the not so exciting reality.

There is no way to 'beat the system'. This type of thinking is what vanity presses live for. Now do your homework, write well, and remember that there are no shortcuts. Ever.

Writing Comics!

I haven't tried to write a comic/graphic novel script for someone else, yet. The format is COMPLETELY different than every other type of writing, and honestly, I'm not yet up for learning yet another format well.

Here are a few links to guidelines, for those that are interested:

http://mysite.verizon.net/joe_edkin/wfcb_fs05a.html

http://www.gertler.com/nat/script.htm

As you can see, they're sort of an entity unto themselves. Each panel is described in terms of character, place and action, with dialogue as needed. Since I like to draw, I may do one of these myself and post the sorry example if we're interested in persuing this further.

Writing a novel is like...

...giving birth to a herd of elephants. Seriously.

It takes forever, can be painful, it's huge, and if you aren't careful, there can be a big mess toward the end of it.

When you're done, you send your elephants out into the world, hoping to see them again at some point. You think about your pretty elephants (the stuff you're proud of), worry about your mutant elephants (the mistakes that you never notice until AFTER sending the damn thing out), and hope neither of them spreads so much poo that no one wants to play with your elephants anymore.

The gestation period is somewhere around forever. One elephant is about two years - but you're carrying a litter!

They're impossible to ignore. I mean, you have a bunch of elephants gestating inside you - it's kinda distracting. No matter what else you're doing or working on, your thoughts keep coming back to those elephants.

I had more to say, but one of my elephants just kicked. Let me know how your elephants are treating you.

How I started my own writing group

There are great online forums all over the web, where you can chat with fellow writers, get feedback, and meet people with shared interests.

My personal favorite is www.absolutewrite.com

I've gotten a lot out of them, and they're great, but sometimes it's nice to commiserate in person, see the physical responses of people reading your work, and of course, get the $&%^ out of the house once in a while.

To that end, I figured I try and start a lil writing group in my area. There are already existing ones, but the happy, fluffy clouds and bunnies 'all writing is good and we welcome everything' love fest isn't all that useful to me.

Rather than trying to call everyone I thought might be interested, I put out an update on facebook, to see who might be interested. (Pre figuring that a third of those who expressed interest would actually show up).

Then, I picked a time and place. I asked about people's schedules, made an educated guess about who would actually show, and picked the location and hour based on that.

Three people showed up, which worked fairly well. I hope to expand the group, but for a first meeting, having more than one person appear was more than I honestly expected. And the enthusiasm more than made up for it - people appeared with shiny new notebooks and pens!

I asked about peoples' goals (after sending an email informing them to think about it). No one seems particularly sure, beyond 'I want to write'. That's okay.

It was very relaxed and silly, and I've given my first assignment. We'll see how that progresses next week.

The McBook

The ever incredible Paperback Writer's list of McBooks, and how to tell if you're writing one.

Hilarious!

Science Fiction Writer's of America - goldmine of information

Besides being an incredible organization of talented writers, the SFWA website hosts a TON of great articles about writing - from the absolute basics, workshop talks, getting an agent, marketing, productivity - you name it.

Read them.  It'll be the best couple of hours of valuable information that you never paid for.

One of the secrets to writing...

...is learning.

Read more than you write.  Read outside of your chosen genre.  Read how-to books.  Try everything.  Absorb what works, discard the rest.

And always take advantage of the information available to you.  The internet is an amazing tool, and experts are always happy to share what they've learned.

In the video linked above, three successful horror screenwriters talk shop and answer questions.  You can view the whole session for free.

How come THEY got published??

Everybody(well, every writing body) goes through that moment:

You pick up a copy of the thing everyone is raving about. A few pages in, you want to hurl the book against the wall in sheer frustration - it's bad. REALLY bad. Head crushing, vomit inducing, mind numbingly BAD. Not long after that, you want to cry, because this thing got published. Then you go through the emotional steps...you get depressed, get mad, incredulous...finally accepting that bad books can, and do, get published.

Below are just my own thoughts - to my knowledge, no in depth study has ever been done about any of these.

There seem to be basically three things that will have a less than stellar book on the market.  

The first is a writer with a huge following, that's now pumping out books that aren't as great. It happens, but that first couple of manuscripts still had to be great.

The second, is that there's some aspect of the work that's so strong, it overshadows a lot of the problems. I'd put Dan Brown in this camp. Hated his sentence structure, oversimplifications, weak characterizations, and flagrant disregard for facts and history. But damn - I had to know what was going to happen next. That's what I'd call a weak writer and a great storyteller. And the simplicity of the prose helped keep the pace fast, though I still wish he'd thought a little more highly of his audience.  

The third, is filling an empty niche. I'd put twilight here. Every eight to ten years, there's a new, hot vampire hero for the latest group of teen girls to swoon over (am I the only one who noticed that?).

Maybe even less time.  

When I was a small bit, there was a tv show called Forever Knight. Horribly cheesy. Had the fan base from Beauty and the Beast (another tragic male lead). Though Lestat was around before then, he caught on big in the early 90's, replacing Mr. Knight. After Lestat, came Angel, and then Spike. 

Now those two are still running around, but the bloom is quite off the rose, particularly for girls who don't want to like what their older siblings did - and want something new. 

Charlaine Harris and Laurell K. Hamilton have been about for a while, but those (especially Hamilton) are not written for a teen audience - unlike Buffy, where teens were the primary target, or Knight, who had more of a Barnabas thing going on, and sex was implied rather than implicit. 

I noticed one other vamp series aimed at kids, but it glosses over the romance aspect.

So there's this fresh generation of newly hormonal tweens, starving for their slightly dangerous, oh so sexy, bad boy with a heart of gold. Enter the ultimate wish fulfillment character, with the ultimate self insert blank slate. Had another teeny bopper bloodsucking hunk hit paper first, that would have been the hot thing instead.

What does all this mean to you? Besides that some luck can be quantified when analyzed far enough, not much. Keep working to write the best book you can, because it's better to rely on strong writing than good timing.

The Queen of Swords

Some of the most amusing, in depth reviews of REALLY BAD books.

Link in the title.

Beatrix Potter? What are you smokin' - self publishing Myth #4

bOne of the things that drives me completely batty about these...

Have you noticed that most of these stories, even while untrue, are from OVER A HUNDRED years ago, when the publishing industry was very different?

There are a couple of reasons for this, not the least of which was the Victorian sensibility.  People were much more easily shocked and offended.  Take that into consideration, and it's not quite so hard to figure out why Delta of Venus had trouble finding a home.

Now, stop to consider what distribution channels must have been like.  There were very few (relatively) national presses, and most companies focused on a local market.  If a writer lived in your home town, it wouldn't be odd to see them hawking their own book.

Different times, different standards.

On to the creator of another beloved children's series:  Peter Rabbit.

Wanna know why publishers originally turned the series down?

Color pictures, particularly in children's books, were very popular at the time, and Peter Rabbit's drawings were in black and white.  Not the writing, not the stories themselves - a hot marketing feature was missing.  Potter re-created her drawings as color plates, produced 250 copies, and distributed those amongst her loved ones.

After seeing the new images, Frederick and Wayne Company signed the first book, The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Mr. McGregor's Garden, in 1902.  By the end of the year, 28,000 copies were in print.  Not too shabby, eh?

Beatrix went on to become a full time writer and illustrator of children's books.

This tale is more telling in terms of 'give the publisher what they want' than any self pub stardom - notice there was no wide release until AFTER she signed.  And had the illustrations been in color in the first place...

Potter didn't become a household name by self publishing; she did it by both having the talent, and giving the publisher what they wanted in the first place.

Busted.

Mark Twain not so ahead, Self Publishing Myth #3

This has to be one of the stupider ones used for ‘proof’ – because Clemens lived in a time where it wasn’t all that odd for the writer to carry the expense, but he still almost went bankrupt.

 Samuel Clemens became a printer’s apprentice when he was 12, a year after his father died.  In 1851, he started doing typesetting and contributing articles and sketches to The Hannibal Journal, his brother’s newspaper.

 At 22, he returned to Mississippi, studying to become a riverboat captain, a position which he kept until 1861.

 Twain’s first notable work(so far-as new things come up from time to time), The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, was published in the New York Saturday Press.  Not long after, he was commissioned by the Sacramento Union to write letters about his travels.

There’s a lot more, as Twain was an extremely prolific writer, and I can’t get into all of it in the space of a blog, so we’ll move on to the first of his most well known works.

 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was first published in England by Chatto and Windus, then picked up for US release by American Publishing Company in 1876.  (Innocents Abroad, a travelogue about the Holy Land, was already wildly popular – not only as periodical articles, but as a bound feature – Twain was already well established when he forayed into the land of full length fiction..) 

 

Hmmm. No self publishing here…

 

His very first book, The Gilded Age, was a collaboration between himself and Charles Dudley Warner.  Also printed by American Publishing Company in 1873, it met many lukewarm reviews, mostly due to the two halves of the book not meshing well.

 

No self publishing there, either.

 

Twain loved technology, and part of the goal for starting his own publishing company was to revolutionize the printing press. He started his own publishing company with his nephew. Called the Charles L. Webster Publishing Company, who’s first printed book was…

 A two volume set of memoirs by Robert E. Lee.

The Huckleberry Finn debate: did Twain’s own company publish the book, or not?  The story seems to go as such:  After a falling out with the American Publishing Company, Twain attempted to publish Huck Finn through his own company, where it (like most of the other works he published) was a whispering flop. 

Unlike most of the self publishing stories, Twain was trying to run his own publishing company, printing far more than his own work.  He nearly went bankrupt as a result, and the company failed completely in 1894.

 

The complete list of books published through this company can be found here:

 

http://www.twainquotes.com/websterco.html

 

It seems pretty clear that Twain’s goal was to become a publisher, not specifically to self publish.  Plus, he had literally hundreds of works under his belt before moving in this direction.  Not too many casual observers even know that he had his own company.

 

Myth Busted.

Crimes of exaggeration - Self Publishing Myth Debunked #2

Love him or not, chances are you've heard of John Grisham.

He was a criminal lawyer, who became inspired to write thrillers, often loosely based on the cases he worked.  Cool.

He's something of a legend in terms of success, selling his first novel from the trunk of his car, rocketing to Hollywood stardom, reserving spots on the bestseller list.

As usual, the best lies about self publishing have a kernel of truth: Grisham did sell a number of his own books from the trunk of his car - that bit is true.

What those 'self publishing success' lists fail to mention, is that the book wasn't self published.

Grisham's first novel, A Time to Kill, was published by Wynwood Press, a regional publisher, in 1988 - after shopping it around for a year.  The initial run was a relatively modest 5,000 copies. Like many books, the entire print run didn't sell.  But it was professionally edited, vetted, polished, and distributed.

Unlike most writers, Grisham could afford to buy the remaindered copies and sell them himself. Unlike clueless self and vanity publishers, he had a direct line to those people who would be interested in crime fiction - namely other lawyers, judges, law enforcement officials - y'know, the people he saw every day.

He also kept writing like mad.  His next novel, The Firm, was purchased by Bantam/Doubleday and went on to be a bestseller in 1991.  That's what got Hollywood's attention.

The first film made from his books was actually the unknown (at the time) A Time to Kill, and was produced in 1993.

No denying that it was a combination of luck and writing prowess that lifted him into household name territory - but self publishing had nothing at all to do with it.  Nothing.

Not so over the rainbow - Self Publishing Success Myth Busted #1

Ok, nothing seems to get to me lately quite like these self publishing success MYTHS. They get spread around like rotting fish jelly to mire the starry eyed, and stink just as badly.

They're bad for the expectations of new writers who jump into this route, mistakenly believing that fame and fortune is simply a matter of time.

These myths sport various ranges of misinformation, exaggeration, and just plain fabrication - and are spouted right and left by both clueless writers and scam publishers.

The first one I'm going to tackle is extremely short and sweet, and features one of my favorite childhood writers: L. Frank Baum.

Originally, he was a newspaper writer; going on to write Mother Goose in Prose, Father Goose: His Book, and my favorite as a small child - The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Baum's first book, Mother Goose, was published in 1897 by Way and Williams.

The Wizard of Oz and the subsequent 13 books in the Oz series were published by the George M. Hill Company of Chicago.

Now, the chorus of self publishing will caw and squeal about how Baum self published.  While technically true, none of the enchanting children's books that he is known and loved for were part of that project.

Nor were any of the numerous short stories, nor the writing he sold under a pen name.

L. Frank Baum did self publish - a pamphlet about chicken farming.

Not quite so exciting now, is it?

Agh, my eyes! How NOT to write a screenplay

I just got sent a short script that is a nightmare.  Sparing y'all the pain of slogging through this mess, here are a few tips. WRITE IN THE PRESENT TENSE.  Whatever is going on, even in flashback, happens right in front of your audience. If a character's 'eyes well with sympathy' chances are he's not going to throw the other guy to the ground yelling 'What the hell are you doing you basted!'.  And it's bastard. Unless you are covering the stewing character in his own juices to make a tasty roast.  Which could be interesting.... An upper crust exec would probably not wax poetic about how his lost love 'hypnotized him with obsession, created a love beyond ages'.  This is the over poetic hype of an angsty, psudo artsy college student.  If that's your guy, fine.  Otherwise, the leave the antequated prose to Yeats and Poe.  It lacks authenticity. Vietnam vets will rarely just sit down and say that thier experiences were anything like yours.  Especially to a stranger.  If you are lucky to find one of these back porch story tellers, the level of detail in the storytelling will be amazing. not 'I lost a lot of people in 'nam, it get's easier'.  Sheesh.  If you have no idea what went on, or have never spoken to a veteran, don't put that there.  It makes you sound like an idiot.  And the vagueness of the statement in this script will merely confuse the viewer. NARRATION.  There have been great films that use it.  Probably not yours. Especially when the narrator is talking about exactly what's happening in your frame. REDUNDANT. The whole medium is 'show'.  If your audience can't tell what's going on by the action, or the narration doesn't take us farther into the character's head, lose it.  Remember fight club? The narration brought us deeper into the character's mind, enhancing the relationship with the viewer.  It was not there to tell us 'so and so was on his way home from work when....' If you can't show that, you have no business directing. I'm sure I will be subjected to many more miserable scripts before even the end of the year.  If anyone has a specific question, feel free to shoot.

’But my character is so COOL...’

...and your writing still sucks. One of the things that I've started noticing in aspiring fantasy writers is that, rather than working on the craft of writing, they're convinced that if the idea is cool enough, the story will be cool. Not so much. Please, please, no more vampires, werewolves, vampire/werewolf/elf/ninja/pirates(yep, I actually saw one of those).  Tortured souls in the rain seems to be popular as well - except these 'dark silouhettes' always seem to be 'bourne upon the wind'  on high 'spires' while 'lurking in drenched pain heart-rivers'(if you can find a more obtuse and poorly worded way of saying 'standing outside like a dumbass on the highest point in a thunderstorm', let me know). I have a thought for you: Stephen King. While the most successful horror writer of our time has touched upon all sorts of otherworldly beasties, his main characters tend to be very everyday folks. Yet somehow, these 12 year old kids, small town cops, struggling writers, etc, are some of the strongest characters in modern literature(yes, I consider King to be literature). Because? They're real.  They are fully formed, well rounded people, with strengths, weaknesses, fears, joys, histories, and above all: WRITTEN WELL.  Some of his bit players, I wouldn't be suprised to see pop up on a small town street to say 'Ayuh'. If all it took were 'cool' characters, every piece of eye bleeding, giggle inducing, or just plain painful fanfiction based on a masterpiece would be on the bestseller list.  Yet every bit of it I've suffered through has been unreadable. Because these people never bothered learning how to write - so the characters they love so much have been rendered flat and dull, lacking even the vibrancy of a child's crayon drawing. Please, please, stop.  I beg you.  Stop slaughtering the characters you love, stop making a mockery of those supernatural creatures you adore so much. Unless its for spoof purposes. I think I'm going to write about a vampire elf pirate ninja werewolf just for silliness factor.  Heh.

No more, I beg you - plots/characters done to death

About a week, and a few hundred screenplay reviews later, I have ever increasing respect for the work it takes to finish one, as well as my own writing skills. Then again, as a contest, I wasn't necessarily skimming through the cream of the writing world. So this blog is about things that will have you tossed in a heartbeat(or have a reader who is paid to read and critique the whole script banging their head against a wall). Watch out for genre. If you're a stellar, original writer, you'll be able to take any premise and turn it on it's ear. This is actually harder than it sounds. There were a couple of scripts that were written pretty well, but everything in them was such old hat, that it felt like I was reading a couple of other movies mashed together, down to 'this scene was from x, and that one was from y'. And everyone's favorite plotlines: 1. The absolute most common one involved a writer with a problem, talking to a character in their mind or God. Whether this other character was a disembodied voice, object, therapist, whatever, this other character's sole purpose seemed to be either to taunt the protagonist with 'clever'(read, the writer found it clever, just like the other 6,000 writers) dime store existentialism, or to feed the protagonist lines in order for the main character to spout the same dogma. If your character or your 'voice' really has something interesting or unique to say, it could work - don't bank on it. The one thing that each of these scripts had in common(the actual storylines varied greatly) was that it looked like a mental masturbation session. Each writer plodded through the tired themes and eye rolling 'revelations', wallowing in their own perceived cleverness until I wanted to bash my head through the monitor. I'm sure every one of them genuinely thought they had something fresh and innovative to say - at least 40% of the scripts I read featured the same themes, addressed in exactly the same narssisistic fashion. Oh, and each of the writers(characters) in these screenplays were either struggling drunks, or wildly successful. Please, please, keep your personal fantasies or angst out of the characters, unless you're sure you really can hit new ground. 2. The Chosen One. I'm not sure whether to blame Bruce Almighty or The Matrix for this. The reluctant hero is chosen by some higher force to either deliver a message or save the world. So what did the two movies mentioned above have in common? They took this storyline and presented it in a new and innovative way. That does not mean that you can rip from either of these and be new, now its been done before. So your small town hero/messenger/Messiah damn well better be different, or have something new to say. And please, please, let the 'evil' character be something exciting. After wading through all of these evil, hot women trying to seduce the protagonist, I was dying to see an old fashioned demon. Or something with horns. Which leads us to - 3. Demonic Temptation. Old hat, but a sure one. Everyone loves that whole cosmic good vs. evil deal. There's nothing even wrong with your character wanting fame/fortune/sex - classic desires. But again, the presentation HAS to be fresh! What makes your protagonist different than the hundreds before, who have had the same desires, only to reach a point of enlightenment about 60 pages in, to realize they were better off before? 4. Da Mob I like a good Mafia movie, I really do. What I don't want to see is, however well written, a rehash of every Scorsese movie ever made, to the point that I can pick out each scene, and the movie it came from. Accents are tricky to write well. If you don't have the chops for it, readin' sometin' dat look like dis or worse is tough to get through, stilts the script itself, and does nothing for the sense of character. Say the person has a Brooklyn or Bronx accent, then let it go. 5. 'Action' scripts with no action! This is more of a writing thing than a story thing, but a heavy dialogue 'action' script where fight scenes equal 'they fight'??? C'mon, you weren't even trying with that one. On to the writing/character things that drove me nuts: 1. Stupid characters. I'm not talking about writing a character with Down's here, I'm talking about just plain stupid. Heads of state that don't know their pronouns. 'Brilliant' scientists that don't know the formal name for their own specialty. 'Genius' villains that are no smarter than the average teenager, with an attempt to make them look smarter by making every other character sound like a grade school dropout.  This can be used as a technique for parody, such as in Idiocracy - where US culture looked down on being smart for so many generations, the brains were just bred out of people. Almost every character was a complete idiot, but for a reason.  Otherwise, if you can't write 'smart' characters, don't. If you want a criminal mastermind, please don't make every other character stupid. Being average in a script full of idiots is like winning the grand prize at Poetry.com. It's just weak writing. Think of some great criminals - Hannibal Lecter, for instance. He didn't escape because the guards were stupid; he escaped because he was just that much smarter. Die Hard - how boring would that have been if the criminals had been dumb? It was gripping because John McClane was just a touch smarter, more resourceful, than the believable international criminals. I cannot emphasize enough how dull, bland, flat out LAME it is to see a script with an incredibly simple 'puzzle' or 'twist' and have the characters puzzling over it, when the average eight year old would be yelling 'It's x dumbass!!' Thrillers, action scripts, and horror movies seem to be most guilty of this. 2. The not so secret 'secret' symbol or clue How hard is it to come up with an original or obscure symbol for the characters to puzzle over? Helpful hints: neither the Eye of Horus nor an Ankh is mysterious enough for a group of teens to be flummoxed by, let alone a group of scientists. If you're not clear on the symbol, trust that a concept artist will be able to come up with something suitably cool. 3. Poorly explained away 'science' Often, in something with sci - fi overtones, there will be a technology that does something impossible. A lot of the time, if that machine is not the central object in the story, the audience won't really care how it works, such as Eternal Sunshine or The Prestige. Those bits of tech were never really explained, but within each respective world, they were buyable, accepted, and the story went on. Give enough hints as to how your tech works to make it believable, and move on. Or don't address it at all. Please, don't mangle current scientific concepts, or have a character say something to the effect 'you wouldn't understand' when another character asks. Either one is obnoxious. 4. Opening with a dream, or worse - the whole thing was just a dream The first is not always a deal breaker, the second, almost completely. I'm not sure what more to say about this. The reason being, that the viewer/reader becomes invested in the characters as they are presented, only to have to start over again after the dream 'ends'. How annoying is that? The exception comes when that opening scene is over the top in some way, either visuals(shimmering landscapes, morphing cars) or premise(a song and dance number on the moon, a 12 year old leading a guerilla militia) that's no more than two pages long. Long enough to understand why this dream is happening, short enough that the viewer isn't annoyed about being drawn into a storyline, only to have to start over. The whole thing was a dream just never works, here's why. The payoff will never be enough to have sat through over an hour of people, places, and events that didn't actually happen. Proviso: if the events are occurring within the mind of the character, and there are allusions to that throughout the work, then the reveal can be satisfying - because there's a puzzle of sorts involved. See Identity, for example. No spoilers here, but this is an example of a movie that uses the dual reality to great advantage. 5. Characters doing something 'out of character' for no reason, and characters without flaws, or only flaws These are vague enough to find your own example, but let's hit the second two for a moment. Have you ever met anyone without flaws? Or someone who implies that they have none? How dull would that person be? Likewise, a villain who's just evil. What motivates someone to do things just because it's wrong? How much more interesting a character who either has chosen greed over virtue, or one who, like Magneto, for example, genuinely believes that they are doing the right thing? So, those are my top five peeves in the plot/character category. Feel free to add your own, or discuss any of them further.

The winners of ’script I never want to see again’

Beyond writing, formatting, whatever else, lies the Holy Grail of Gimme A Break:The movie that I've seen before. Many times before.Did you really think changing some character names and moving around a scene or two is viable in terms of creating a new script!???? I'm not talking about a familiar theme, or even a movie along the lines of something that's already out there. I'm talking, 'I've seen this EXACT movie'. Every scene, every character...it's deja vu all over my screen. It's the difference between handing me a rip-off of The Matrix, and handing me the screenplay of The Matrix, with a few character names changed, and maybe a line of dialogue altered here or there.Strangely enough, rather than pulling from some obscure foreign film that may have died due to marketing weaknesses, these screenplays seem interested in stealing 'movie of the week' biopics from the 1980's. The story wasn't strong enough to translate to the big screen then; why do you think that has changed??? (Sorry for the multiple question marks - it seems more polite than shouting.) I guess I can't knock someone for trying a theme that worked in the past (note: every screenplay follows a certain formula, it has to do with the filler whether the movie tastes like an eclair, pasty, or toilet.)But I cannot fathom why someone would take a mediocre script, with barely any conflict, a shadow of characterization, a lack of all things that make a movie great, and then try and submit THAT as their own work.Perhaps, because it might be less recognizable than a blockbuster? I dunno. It wasn't good then, and it ain't good now. Please, write your own work. Whether it's good or rough, at least it will be your own. You own it, take pride in the fact that it's yours. The rest will come with time and practice. Only lazy bastards steal other people's work. Only slime claims it as their own.