Storytelling Notes

Here are quotes and notes about storytelling worth sharing no matter in which language.

Last updated: September 23, 2024

• General
• Creative process
• Audience
• Characters
• Relationships
• Themes/Ideas
• Structure
• Scenes
• Dialogue
• Revisions

General

A compelling HERO,
A palpable and worthy OBSTACLE
A valuable GOAL with life-or death (physically, spiritually or emotionally) STAKES, and
A THEME that can connect and resonate with an audience.

Tragedy is the repesentation of action, and action involves agents who will necessarily have certain qualities of both character and intellect. It is because of the qualities of the agents that we classify their actions, and it is because of their actions that they succeed or fail in life. It is the story of the action that is the representation. By the ‘story’ I mean the plot of the events.
The most important element is the construction of the plot. Tragedy is a representation not of persons but of action and life, and happiness and unhappiness consist in action. The point is action, not character: it is their moral status that gives people the character they have, but it is their actions that make them happy or unhappy.
Tragedy is a representation of an action that is whole and entire and on an appropriate scale. A whole is something that has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
An adequate limit of length is a size that permits a transformation from adversity to prosperity, or from prosperity to adversity, in a probable or necessary sequence of events.
An infinity of things happen to a single individual, not all of which constitute a unity; likewise, a single person performs many actions which do not add up to make a single action.
A story, since it is the representation of an action, should concern an action that is single and entire, with its several incidents so structured that the displacement or removal of any one of them would disturb and dislocate the whole.
The poet’s job is not relating what actually happened, but rather the kind of thing that would happen—that is to say, what is possible in terms of probability and necessity. Poetry utters universal truths. The universal truths concern what befits a person of a certain kind to say or do in accordance with probability and necessity.
Of defective stories* and actions, the worst are those that are episodic. I call a story episodic when the sequence of episodes is neither necessary nor probable.
I call an action complex if the change of fortune involves a reversal or a discovery or both.* These should grow naturally out of the plot of the story, so that they come about, with necessity or probability, from the preceding events.
For tragedy at its best the plot should be complex, not simple, and it should be representative of fearsome and pitiable events.

Suspense begins with the three C’s:
the contract, the clock, and the crucible.
The contract is an implied promise you make to the reader about what will be delivered by the end of the book. It is crucial in storytelling that you keep every single promise you have made, no matter how trivial. If you’ve suggested that your protagonist wants to buy a little black dress, by the end we’ve got to see her buy one or understand why she didn’t.
Clock refers to the fact that adding time pressure to any character’s struggle will create higher stakes and more interest for your reader.
Think of the crucible as a box that constrains your characters, offers them no escape, and forces them to act. Your story should present an increasingly difficult series of tasks and situations for the hero that will funnel him into the most severe trial of all.

Be specific rather than vague
Concepts, generics, generalizations, can't engage us emotionally. If we can't visualize it, we can't feel it. For something to really penetrate it needs to be put in a context that allows us to vicariously experience it.

If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.

Creative process

Whether you are an adult or child, your first attempts will often seem unimportant or foolish. The open mic night at a nearly empty bar. The early blog posts that get ignored. The dance recital on a little stage. Early attempts are easy to dismiss because they don't seem to amount to much. But you have to do the low stakes stuff to prepare for the high stakes stuff. They are the building blocks of confidence, and that's an enormous thing.

Artists must be allowed to go through bad periods! They must be allowed to do bad work! They must be allowed to get in a mess! They must be allowed to have dud experiments! They must also be allowed to have periods where they repeat themselves in a rather aimless, fruitless way before they can pick up and go on. The kind of attention that they get now, the kind of atmosphere of excitement which attends today the creation of works of art, the way that everything is done too much in the public eye, it’s really too much. The pressures are of a kind which are anti-creative.

Consider everything an experiment.

Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail, there’s only make.

Dont try to create and analyze at the same time. They’re different processes.

Because we feel frustrated, we start to look at problems from a new perspective.
At the time, there were two basic ways to write a song. The first was to be like the Bob Dylan that Dylan was trying to escape: compose serious lyrics on a serious topic. The second way was to compose an irresistible jingle full of major chords. Such predictability is precisely what Dylan wanted to avoid; he couldn't stand the clichéd constraints of pop music. And this is why that "vomitific" writing was so important: Dylan suddenly realised that it was possible to celebrate vagueness, to write lines that didn't insist on making sense.
What Dylan did was find the strange thread connecting those disparate voices. During those frantic first minutes of writing, his right hemisphere found a way to make something new out of this incongruous list of influences, drawing them together into a catchy song.
The constant need for insights has shaped the creative process...the difficulty of the task accelerates the insight process.

An insight is like finding a needle in a haystack. There are a trillion possible connections in the brain, and we have to find the exact right one. Just think of the odds!

I am always doing what I can't do yet in order to learn how to do it.

You have to really love your idea. It has to be something from deep within. It has to be personal. It has to excite you on a deep level. Because you’re going to have to persevere for several years. There are going to be a lot of critics, a lot of mean-spirited people are gonna say, ‘You can never do that!’
When you create anything, the spirit you create it with, the energy, the excitement, is translated into the product itself. So when somebody writes a book just for money, you can kind of smell it. When you read the book, it kind of reeks. We can sense that. But when the writer is excited, it excites the reader. So the love and the desire you put into your project will translate.

Your voice has an external source. It is not lying within you. It is lying in other people’s poetry. It is lying on the shelves of the library. To find your voice, you need to read deeply. You need to look inside yourself, of course, for material, because poetry is something that honors subjectivity. It honors your interiority. It honors what’s inside. But to find a way to express that, you have to look outside yourself.
Read widely, read all the poetry you can get your hands on. And in your reading, you’re searching for something. Not so much your voice. You’re searching for poets that make you jealous. Professors of writing call this “literary influence.” It’s jealousy. And it’s with every art, whether you play the saxophone, or do charcoal drawings. You’re looking to get influenced by people who make you furiously jealous.
Read widely. Find poets that make you envious. And then copy them. Try to get like them.
After you find your voice, you realize there’s really only one person to imitate, and that’s yourself. You do it by combining different influences...But gradually you come under the right influences, picking and choosing, and being selective, and then maybe your voice is the combination of 6 or 8 other voices that you have managed to blend in such a way that no one can recognize the sources...This allows you to be authentic. That’s one of the paradoxes of the writing life: that the way to originality is through imitation.

「＃不要從椅子上站起來」就是我的秘訣，記者很常問我，怎麼紓壓，我才不要放鬆呢，因為還沒寫完之前就不要放鬆。因為不會有人幫你把劇本寫完，也不會出現什麼魔法突然就寫好了，我只有持續坐在椅子上盯著螢幕，才能把劇本寫完，這是最大祕訣之一。
然後第二個祕訣就是「多聽別人說話、多去做訪問」，也就是多去學習的意思；最後一個就是去看好萊塢寫三幕劇的構成，真的要講訣竅，學好三幕劇是什麼東西，然後就是去外面採訪，再把自己黏到椅子上，就是這三點。

The writer must be four people:
1) The nut, the obsédé
2) The moron
3) The stylist
4) The critic
1 supplies the material; 2 lets it come out; 3 is taste; 4 is intelligence.
A great writer has all 4 but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2; they’re most important.

Let your work stand before deciding whether or not to serve.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Audience

Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

作品は観客に届いた時点で観客のもの。

The audience does not want to be a casual observer of the movie you’re writing. They want to participate. They want to be given the same clues as everyone in your film and to be putting things together in their head. If you’re able to surprise them with a reversal they didn’t see coming, you’ve given them a very satisfying experience.
Treat them as intelligent and don’t lose them by writing something that may seem unbelievable.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

Characters

Characterization: What makes one character different from everyone else
It makes it obvious when a character’s one difference from other characters is her race or sexuality or ableness or class (etc.).
It acknowledges the usefulness of “types” to differentiate, especially when the character is the only one of that type in a story.
Writing other characters with similar but different types in fact helps make each type stand out.
This definition takes the focus off the dreaded “relatability” argument (that what makes a character compelling has to do with similarities between the character and readers).
Characters in a piece of fiction carry and convey meaning within their specific context (of other characters and of world and of other fictional elements like plot or theme).
It’s easy to explain that what makes an elf: an elf may be his difference from a human or an orc (different types), but what makes an elf a Legolas is his difference from other elves (difference within the same type).

Double Factor Problem:
The answer changes depending on the context.
To keep the work from becoming preachy, propaganda, or one dimensional, show all the sides of the problem by introduce characters that are all dealing with the problem in different ways.

キャラクターを考える軸：◯◯すぎる性格→憧れ性、共通性
キャラクターの軸→欲望→秘密

[CHARACTER] wants [X] without having to [Y]

Create conflict in a story:
Level 1: Characters want different things.
Level 2: Characters want the same thing for different reasons.
Level 3: Characters want the same thing for the same reason but go about it in different ways.

The single most important question I think that one must ask one’s self about a character is: ‘What are they really afraid of?’

A man's character is his fate.

As long as you establish what’s important to your hero—ideally, something that your audience can relate to—and help the reader imagine what might happen if the hero loses that important thing, then you can create high stakes.

A character is born from the intention and obstacle—they want something, and something stands in their way of getting it. How they overcome those obstacles, or what tactics they use, define who the character is.
Stick to the facts of a character that matter to the conflict—this saves you the trouble of writing long, unnecessary character bios.

Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.

主人公は、公私のどの面から見ても、完全なキャラクターを持った人物。
脇役は、主人公と関わるシーン以外では、基本的に描かれません。
端役は、ある状況のときだけキャラクターを持つ人物。

The hero does change. The hero is capable of wanting something different at the end of the story than he or she did at the start.

Protagonist Checklist: The 6 Levels of Change
1. Status
2. Values
3. Worldview
4. Physical: Life - Death
5. Connections with other characters
6. Source of meaning

Odysseus learned from his shadow side too. Some call this pattern the discovery of the “golden shadow” because it carries so much enlightenment for the soul. The general pattern in story and novel is that heroes learn and grow from encountering their shadow, whereas villains never do.

Member of the pond:
1. Agitator: To change
2. Defender: To protect
3. Surfer: To utilize

Fish out of water:
1. Prospector: To extract value and go home
2. Missionary: To go and change
3. Pilgrim: To go and stay

The villain starts the story; the hero ends it.

I know, when I’m stuck in my Second Act, I remind myself, “Go back to the villain. Make him or her smarter, make him/her more formidable, more ruthless, more dangerous.”
Keep the villains coming at the hero from everywhere.

Villains are the heroes of their own stories.

Nobody is a villain in their own story.

The villain believes in a world of scarce resources and a competition of all against all.
The tyrant or despot, in his or her own mind, is not operating out of greed or lust for power or the desire to crush his or her enemies. Rather he or she is acting—in his or her own view, that is—as any prudent, responsible person would act, given the fact that the human race is evil and, if society is to avert catastrophe, cannot be permitted to act out of its own blind, self-interested instincts.
When we write our own villains, it’s important to keep this in mind. The Bad Guy, in his own view, is not bad. He’s just being “realistic.”
The villain never changes because what he/she wants never changes. If the villain were capable of change, he’d be the hero.

Once your villain has a good argument, you need to figure out what you want from them. Are they going to be funny? Horrific? A character readers love to hate? This choice is key to the tone of your story. Your hero may have a devil may care attitude and the villain should be just the opposite kind of crazy. A yin and yang so to speak. I like to look at my protagonist and imagine if they were the antagonist. Flip-flopping the roles can help you work in realistic reactions and know exactly where everyone’s breaking points are. There’s a symmetry to a villain who is the protagonist had they made one different decision. The idea that the MC is teetering on the edge and that the villain is even helping them stay on the side of “good” is always interesting.

One character in our drama must carry the story’s secret.

Good books don't give up all their secrets at once.

1. Injunctions
Don’t cry—emotions are shameful, keep them to yourself.
Don’t think—your opinions aren’t worth much. Or, boys don’t like smart girls.
Don’t be you—why can’t you be more like (fill in the blank)?
Don’t exist—I gave up my own hopes and dreams so I could take care of you.
Don’t belong—trying to fit in will only get you hurt.
Don’t be a child—grow up so you can look after me.
Don’t grow up—children are cute; teenagers are a drag.
Don’t be the sex you are—men are disgusting, cheating slobs. Or women are weak and fickle.
Don’t be important—you don’t deserve accolades or attention.
Don’t love—if you get attached, people will only hurt you.

2. Drivers
These are the messages that drive us to achieve, and sometimes come across as conditional love—I will only love you if you live up to my expectations. A character may only feel good about herself as long as she fulfills the command:
Be perfect. Try harder. Please others. Hurry up. Be strong.

Psychological tug-of-war:
I shouldn’t try to be important, but it’s okay as long as I’m perfect.
People will only care about me if I do all I can to please them.
I shouldn’t have feelings, but I do. So I have to hide them and be strong in order to be accepted.

Relationships

電影創作者的教科書一定都會說不要用對白來拍電影，但我覺得現在不太一樣了，電影視覺跟文字結合之後會產生不同的意義。所以我相信在特別需要描寫人際關係時，對話會是重要元素。

All good relationships are earned through trials and turbulence.

Themes/Ideas

The non-negotiable:
What do you think causes the most pain in the world?
What do you wish everyone would understand?
What or who would you die for?
Where do you draw a line in the sand and say 'here and no further'?
What change do you want to effect in how your reader perceives themselves or the world around them?
I want to move the reader from believing ___ about themselves, the world or themselves in the world, to believing ___ about themselves, the world or themselves in the world.
You can only solve the [Double Factor Problem], once you have made the change in the [Non-negotiable].

You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.
You get ideas when you ask yourself simple questions. The most important of the questions is just, What if...?
Another important question is, If only...
And then there are the others: I wonder... ('I wonder what she does when she's alone...') and If This Goes On... ('If this goes on telephones are going to start talking to each other, and cut out the middleman...') and Wouldn't it be interesting if... ('Wouldn't it be interesting if the world used to be ruled by cats?')...
An idea doesn't have to be a plot notion, just a place to begin creating. Plots often generate themselves when one begins to ask oneself questions about whatever the starting point is.
Sometimes an idea is a person ('There's a boy who wants to know about magic'). Sometimes it's a place ('There's a castle at the end of time, which is the only place there is...'). Sometimes it's an image ('A woman, sifting in a dark room filled with empty faces.') Often ideas come from two things coming together that haven't come together before. ('If a person bitten by a werewolf turns into a wolf what would happen if a goldfish was bitten by a werewolf? What would happen if a chair was bitten by a werewolf?')

“What do I want to know?”
During your reading, also look for complex arguments that will lead you to moral gray areas.

Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.

人に言われて「イヤだ、これは絶対にやりたくない」「こういう曲は歌いたくない」っていうもののほうが、ヒットする可能性が高い

“Fortune favors the bold” is a mighty truth, even if it can’t be proven empirically in a laboratory or on a blackboard by mathematics.
Start before you’re ready.
Write what you don’t know.
Pick the idea that’s craziest.
Write the book you can’t write.

Learning from the great Elia Kazan, I always try to have a word that is the core of what the movie is really about.
In one word.
For Godfather, the key word is “succession.” That’s what the movie is about. Apocalypse Now: “morality.”
The Conversation: “privacy.”
Megalopolis. You know what it is? “Sincerity.” That’s the word I use when I say, “What should I do?”

The principles on which I planned all operations were:
1. The ultimate intention must be an offensive one.
2. The main idea must be simple.
3. That idea must be held in view throughout and everything else must give way to it.
4. The plan must have in it an element of surprise.

But once your basic story is on paper, you need to think about what it means and enrich your following drafts with your conclusions. To do less is to rob your work (and eventually your readers) of the vision that makes each tale you write uniquely your own.

Structure

For stories, what repeats is a simple three-point structure that’s great at capturing human attention.
1. The problem: This is a situation that creates uncertainty and generates tension. Elsewhere, these problems might be referred to as openings, hooks, inciting incidents, or dramatic questions. From here until the next point, tension will rise.
2. The turning point: At the climax of tension, the protagonist struggling with the story’s problem is sorely tested. In that moment, they either prove themself worthy or they fall short. This point isn’t positioned in the center of the story; it is close to the end. From here, tension falls rapidly.
3. The resolution: If the protagonist was worthy, the problem is solved. If they were unworthy, something bad happens. Either way, uncertainty is gone and tension dissipates, leaving the audience with a feeling of satisfaction.

The Five Commandments of Storytelling:
1. Inciting Incident:
The inciting incident destabilizes the protagonist by upsetting the balance of their life for good or for ill.
2. Turning Point Progressive Complication
The protagonist goes through a series of actions to restore balance to the world after the inciting incident. As these actions fail, it progressively complicates the story until the protagonist faces a final turning point where everything they have tried fails.
3. Crisis
The crisis poses a real choice between incompatible options with meaningful stakes. It is always a binary “this or that” choice. Every crisis is either a Best Bad Choice (choosing between two horrible things) or an Irreconcilable Goods choice (choosing between two wonderful things).
4. Climax
The climax is the active answer to the question raised by the crisis. The climax always reveals the truth about who the AVATAR really is when they enact their choice under pressure.
5. Resolution
Because the crisis had meaningful stakes, when the AVATAR makes a decision, something meaningful will always happen as a result.

Start as close to the end as possible.

The intention and obstacle of the story is like the drive shaft of car. Who wants what, and what is stopping them from getting it?
It’s not until you introduce the intention that you’ve really begun the story.

You don’t have a story unless you can use the words “but,” “except,” or “and then,” which means an obstacle has been introduced and now there’s conflict.

The beginning of your novel has to accomplish a lot. It must introduce the hero, the villain, and the world of the story, as well as the story’s sole dramatic question, and it must do this with enough energy to grab your reader’s interest right away.

Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Knowing we must have a midpoint—and what changes that midpoint must deliver—will help us enormously when we encounter the despair of Act Two. We have to ask ourselves: What must happen in my story that will raise the stakes dramatically, change the dynamics between all my principal characters, and make the drama suddenly become about a deeper, more profound version of the conflict as I’ve presented it so far?

Progressive Complications:
1. The protagonist must try new and riskier tactics to get their Object of Desire.
2. Each time, a force of antagonism must block them.
3. The protagonist must run out of ideas for getting their Object of Desire.

Power of 10:
Come up with 10 ideas for adding energy to your scene.
1. Pick strong Object of Desires for your characters.
2. Turn the internal desires of the characters into external actions.
3. Constantly ask, "How can I make this worse?".
4. Back your characters into corners to see what is important to them.
5. Practice going "too far."

Create secondary characters who bring new tensions to the story.
Introduce new problems. Whatever situation your hero is facing at the start of the middle section should become worse.
Give a character a complicated history or situation.
Create obstacles for your hero.
Complicate things. The hero finds something and discovers something much worse.
Keep reminding the reader of the stakes.
Switch back and forth between your hero and villain, and continue showing glimpses of how the struggle for water rights has a concrete impact on the hero—and even on his community.
Find ways to keep your protagonist moving from one location to another. If you know you want to use a certain place in a scene, find a way to get the character there.

Create suspense (let readers know more than the hero, or know the same or less as the hero):
Introduce parallel plot lines. When you’ve got subplots for villains and secondary characters, you create more places for suspense and raise questions in the reader’s mind about how the various stories might be related.
Create a promise in every chapter. What? How? Who? Any question you’ve raised contains a promise that you’ll answer it.
Create a puzzle.
Increase physical danger.
Give characters complicated histories, and withhold information to keep the reader guessing about the dark secrets in someone’s past.
Create a character who never appears on stage. These shadowy power brokers are usually villains, but they can surprise you by being heroes, too. Let the reader learn about being them through other character’s fear of them.
Place your characters in perilous locations.
Delay your hero reaching his smaller goals. Let that surprise phone call happen just before your protagonist is supposed to give an important presentation.
Use dramatic irony to set the stage. Show your villain arriving at the building where the hero is having a lively conversation with an old friend.

If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.

Be sure to avoid any magical surprises in Act 3 by setting up and introducing everything in Act 1 through exposition. One way to get through exposition in your screenplay is to have at least one character early on who is a stand-in for the audience, because they ask questions of the main character that the audience might have.

The third act must build, build, build in tempo and action until the last event, and then—that's it. Don't hang around.

1. The climax must satisfy the view of life implied in your story.
2. The climax must deliver emotion.
3. The climax must deliver an appropriate level of emotion. If your story has focused on domestic irritation, ending it with a character's blowing his brains out won't work. It will feel contrived. Similarly, a saga of violent gangland warfare shouldn't end with a quiet talk between the leaders and a subtle symbol of ambiguous hope. In context, that will feel flat.
4. The climax must be logical to your plot and your story.

「転」の機能は、テーマを伝えること
「結」は、テーマの定着と余韻

(For endings,) Write down everything that is possible. Then pick the most outrage ones which make sense.

The ending wouldn't work with different personalities in the key roles. That's a good sign: Your ending grows naturally out of who your characters are.
In other words, the choice fits with the protagonist's character, not the author's plot needs.

A successful denouement has three characteristics: closure, brevity and dramatization.
Closure means you give your readers enough information about the fate of the characters for them to feel that the book really is over. Show just enough of your characters' futures so that your reader doesn't feel that he's been left hanging.
Brevity is important to a denouement because if it goes on too long, it will leach all emotion from the climax. The more subtle and low-key the climax in action and tone, the briefer the denouement should be.
Dramatization ensures that your denouement feels like part of the story, not a chunk of exposition tacked on after the story's over. Try to show what happens to your characters by showing them in action.

Scenes

Question: what is drama? Drama, again, is the quest of the hero to overcome those things which prevent him from achieving a specific, acute goal.
Every scene should be able to answer three questions: "Who wants what from whom? What happens if they don't get it? Why now?"
The answers to these questions are litmus paper. Apply them, and their answer will tell you if the scene is dramatic or not.
You the writers, are in charge of making sure every scene is dramatic.
This means all the "little" expositional scenes of two people talking about a third. This bushwah (and we all tend to write it on the first draft) is less than useless, should it finally, god forbid, get filmed.
If the scene bores you when you read it, rest assured it will bore the actors, and will, then, bore the audience, and we're all going to be back in the breadline.
Every scene must be dramatic. That means: the main character must have a simple, straightforward, pressing need which impels him or her to show up in the scene.
This need is why they came. It is what the scene is about. Their attempt to get this need met will lead, at the end of the scene, to failure - this is how the scene is over. It, this failure, will, then, of necessity, propel us into the next scene.
Any scene, thus, which does not both advance the plot, and standalone (that is, dramatically, by itself, on its own merits) is either superfluous, or incorrectly written.
The job of the dramatist is to make the audience wonder what happens next. Not to explain to them what just happened, or to*suggest* to them what happens next.
We are not getting paid to realize that the audience needs this information to understand the next scene, but to figure out how to write the scene before us such that the audience will be interested in what happens next.
Start, every time, with this inviolable rule: the scene must be dramatic. It must start because the hero has a problem, and it must culminate with the hero finding him or herself either thwarted or educated that another way exists.
Look at your log lines. Any logline reading "bob and sue discuss..." is not describing a dramatic scene.
Here are the danger signals. Any time two characters are talking about a third, the scene is a crock of shit.
Any time any character is saying to another "as you know", that is, telling another character what you, the writer, need the audience to know, the scene is a crock of shit.
Remember you are writing for a visual medium. Most television writing, ours included, sounds like radio. The camera can do the explaining for you. Let it. What are the characters doing -*literally*. What are they handling, what are they reading. What are they watching on television, what are they seeing.
If you pretend the characters can’t speak, and write a silent movie, you will be writing great drama.
If you deprive yourself of the crutch of narration, exposition, indeed, of speech. You will be forged to work in a new medium - telling the story in pictures (also known as screenwriting).
I close with the one thought: look at the scene and ask yourself "is it dramatic? Is it essential? Does it advance the plot?
Answer truthfully.

What is literally happening in the scene?
What is the essential action of what the characters are doing in the scene?
What life value has changed for one or more of the characters in the scene?

Make sure your protagonist is in the responder role for the vast majority of your scene.
In a beat:
Inciting incident = Stimulus = Input (Characters, world, etc.) knocks the protagonist's life out of balance.
Climax = Response = Output (Protagonist)

Every scene in your screenplay should move the plot forward.
Not every scene needs to end dramatically, but you should feel satisfied with how it does end.
If you are struggling with what the next scene should be, try answering a question posed in the previous scene.
Grab the audience as soon as you can. Try dropping the audience in the middle of a conversation—it forces the audience to pay attention and play catch up.
It’s also satisfying to lay out the theme to your entire movie right in the first scene.
If you’re introducing a character in a scene for the first time, show the audience what the character wants. If a character doesn’t want something, then they are cluttering up your screenplay.
Avoid scenes that are “too wet"—when you start having the characters perform the emotion that you want the audience to be feeling.

當你要創造更大的感動、憤怒、笑點，就要去累積，如果想要吃好吃的早餐，那你前一天就不能吃宵夜，先餓肚子，這同樣的道理。所以我在寫一場戲的時候，我不會把最重要的戲寫在最前面，我會繞路。進餐廳的戲，我會從進門的戲開始寫，例如：誰先進門、誰坐哪一邊，從這些東西開始描寫，觀眾在看的時候會知道這場戲的重點是什麼，但是對話一直圍繞在其他事情，這不是為了要讓對話有趣，而是我要製造懸疑感，讓目的不要顯露出來，就像炸彈，你一直聽到炸彈的聲音，就會有懸疑感，但是爆炸的話，懸疑就不見了。編劇要寫鋪陳，這些描寫就會讓角色有深度。

1. Pick a clock that “fits” your story (hint: if you can’t figure one out, let your genre guide the way).
2. Set an urgent time limit with a hard deadline.
3. Make the Consequences dire and driven by the global content genre.
4. Progressively increase the obstacles that stand in the way of the characters making it on time.
5. Remind your readers the clock is ticking.

Dialogue

The "soul" of the work is located in the superfluous talking that reveals feelings and moods of which even the characters speaking are unaware. Yet, he regards this indirect and often incongruous language as something with which people are familiar. Humans are all faced in their daily lives with the problem of using words to make sense of difficult situations, and they are all aware, argues Maeterlinck, that what they say in such situations may not be what is most important. There are other hidden forces and other words that go unheard that nevertheless determine every situation.

怎麼樣讓對話有趣，就是要讓對話看起來好像對不太到頻率，甚至是「＃沒有在對話時候的對話」最有趣。尤其最重要的，就是要把「愛」藏起來，不能把愛寫出來，只能寫出愛周遭的東西來讓觀眾感受到。
故事本身跟電影劇情一樣，就是讓人去體驗一段經歷，不要讓觀眾去聽創作者說教，而是要創造一個體驗，來讓觀眾去跟著故事，例如說：體驗不甘心、悲喜交加，讓觀眾用自己的想像力去體驗這段經歷。我每次在寫劇本時都相信我的觀眾，讓觀眾有自己的詮釋，這才是真正的創作。所以我會想盡辦法在對話中混淆我的對話，甚至撒謊，把對話藏起來，把最重要的地方留白，不寫進去，把周遭填滿，看我的觀眾能否看見中間的形狀。
我相信讓觀眾自己去思考、去發現，比直接告訴他有趣許多。
我心中想著這些事情，不講出來，而別人也是會懂的。就像是表演也是很類似，你現在就算不作出悲傷的演技，你心裡想著悲傷，就能用各種動作表達出來，編劇也是，人的感情、心情是藏不住的。
譬如說講比較技術性的事情，如：跟喜歡的人拿同一支筆，假如核心的概念就是我很喜歡A，但我不特別去表現出我喜歡A，但當B靠近A時，我卻露出不喜歡B的表情，這就是接近核心了，所以這對於編劇來說是基本功，我在學校也會教學生，像是今天要寫悲傷的心情，但請用10個以外的方式去表現悲傷。

Revisions

I used to say that a good writer throws out the stuff that everybody else keeps. But an even better test occurs to me: perhaps a good writer keeps the stuff everybody else throws out.

We have to recognize that the thing that looks most flawed, might, in fact, be the most interesting thing in the work. So we're not looking for the thing that functions best, because to do that is to only reward the most conventional and most familiar moves the work makes. But to try to recognize the thing that excites us the most, or intrigues us the most, which may be something the writer doesn't even understand.

As I write this, I’m finishing a first draft of a novel. It’s still raw as hell but the basic elements are there (I think.)
Just this week I read it all over, asking myself, “What’s missing, missing, missing?”
Sure enough, there was a lot.
What I’ve found with fiction is what’s usually missing is the Deep Stuff. “What does this all mean?” “What’s the metaphor?” “What’s the theme?”
I ask myself, “What scenes am I missing?” “Am I missing an entire sequence?” “An entire act?”
One exercise that helps every time is I’ll draw a diagram of all the major characters and ask myself, “Does each character have at least one scene with every other character?” Or “Am I missing moments with three or four characters together?”

Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don't like — then cultivate it. That's the only part of your work that's individual and worth keeping.

When receiving notes, be careful who you listen to. You can rely on some people to spot a problem, but unless you’re talking to someone who’s smart, understands scripts, and understands the way you write, take their notes with a grain of salt. For those who may have opinions about your script but aren’t necessarily informed script editors, don’t just disregard their comments. Use their opinions as a sign of a problem that still needs to be fixed.

We can take the beats of your outline, and if the words ‘and then’ belong between those beats… you got something pretty boring. What should happen between every beat you’ve written down is the words ‘therefore’ or ‘but.’

I hunt for the word ‘and’ when I rewrite, especially at big moments of my story. Then I figure out how to make it the word ‘but’ instead.

The world can always use more fairy tales. As writers we always get to mix and match, pick and choose. If one of your stories is feeling stale, perhaps try using an old fairy tale technique. Embrace your artifice, flatten your characters, or make your worldbuilding a bit more nonsensical. And don’t believe anyone who tells you that all stories “must” have round characters or logical worldbuilding or anything else. Stories come in infinite forms, which is as true once upon a time in a land far far away as it is today.