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New and struggling writers, in my experience, tend to undervalue the critiquing process. Not in the context of the way they receive criticism. Most writers seem eager to find out what others have to say about their work. Where they almost all lose beneficial experience is in the act of ripping apart the works of others. There is so much to learn about your own writing in the dissection of others. I agree that it is a largely thankless task. A good number of writers have a very hard time separating themselves from their work. They can't distinguish criticisms of their writing with personal attacks. A frequent face, enough to become familiar, is the (near) first time writer. Screenwriting sees this guy far too often. They have no grasp of the medium and it's conventions they just have a story they need to get down. Even if they have basic form the end result is largely unpolished or flat out uninteresting. The more one reads of the material out there the more you begin to realize that the good material is sparse. It's a lot of slugging through sludge. So what's the point? When working on your own material there is never a true separation. Even if I stop working on something and come back to it a year later I still have quite a bit of information in my head that isn't in my script. Character bios, history, things that happen prior to and after the script, and things that happen in between scenes that just aren't noted. I know so much more about my material than will ever show in the script itself. For that reason alone I can't honestly critique my own work the way that someone else would. I can ask all kinds of questions and use a bunch of different techniques to try and determine what is missing and what isn't required. That's not the same as someone reading it cold. If I can't properly critique my own work the only way that skill is going to get better, which is of wild benefit to my editing skills, is critique others work. I suggest all writers read as much as they can and try to interact with it. Questions it relentlessly. Try and figure out that issues that seem wrong, out of place, or unresolved to you. Be merciless with spelling, grammar, and form. Be the most brutal critic you can be with the works of others. Even if the writer rejects your critiques you've still gathered some valuable experience that will help sharpen the critical skills you bring to your own work. Ideally you'll also given some worthwhile notes to another writer to help them along as well. The idea is to break out of being a passive observer and become an active participant. Take part in and be a part of the material. That includes commercial works as well. Read a script for a movie and rip it to shreds on the basis of the script and not the resulting movie. Your writing will improve for it. david shute - Nov 26, 2008 at 12:33 PM
Scene A Week: "The weight of the strings." The Weight Of The Strings - 1 page scene in PDF format.
david shute - Nov 25, 2008 at 9:43 PM
A curious man asks many questions of one digging what seems to be a random hole. Diggin' A Hole - 4 page short script in PDF format
david shute - Nov 24, 2008 at 7:47 PM
There's something disgustingly opulent about blog circles. I say blog circles because the other word is, quite frankly, mind numbingly stupid. It disturbs me to no end that there are blogs telling you how to have a successful blog. Really? I would like to clarify at this moment in time that this is not a blog. This is my personal website where I entertain the illusion that anyone might be remotely entertained by the crap that falls out of my head. I'd beg you not to ruin the surprise for me but that would imply that anyone other than me is reading this. Delightfully psychotic. There's still two full length feature scripts, three by the time I'm caught up if I include my NaPlWriMo script. I think I'm caught up on mostly everything else however. My foreseeable schedule, provided things work out, should be as follows.
david shute - Nov 21, 2008 at 1:23 PM
On the cusp of realizing all his dreams Danny has the pillar of his life taken out from underneath him. In response he runs. Boy Meets Girl - 120 page screenplay in PDF format
david shute - Nov 20, 2008 at 7:07 PM
I'm intrigued by, and have made passing comments during conversations about, an open XML standard for the screenplay format. It really makes me wish I knew more about proposing markup standards and where to even start. As much as I can hack together helper applications I am not a programmer. I'm quite a distance away from being one actually. If I understood the practical applications and requirements of parsing an XML document in to something that resembles a screenplay then perhaps I'd be a little closer to starting on that journey. The opportunities it opens are fairly self evident I would think. Clean interoperability across systems and applications, provided they choose to adopt the standard. Ease of formatting and rendering for web pages. Ease of developing new applications by allowing developers to bypass creating a proprietary file format. Possibility of adoption of the screenwriting standard by standard word processing applications. I think this would be brilliant despite my expectations that the Final Draft folks would likely ignore it for as long as they possibly could. The benefits of being able to collaborate regardless of application would be ideal. As much as I love Celtx I'd like to be able to smoothly send information back and forth with users of other applications. Importing and exporting of formatted plain text is never perfect. When I sit down to write I expect to be able to do just that. I don't want to have to stop to correct formatting issues. In terms of application development and support, the first thing that jumps out at me is OpenOffice. It should be largely trivial to code a plugin for OpenOffice to support any XML documents including a screenwriting standard. Adoption of the standard, or easy support via plugin, by such a massive cross platform suite would allow anyone to work on a screenplay with proven, stable software. Being able to save in an open format would mean being able to easily transition to new or more specialized software at any time. I'm sure I'm looking at a pipe dream here considering how small and fragmented the screenwriting community is. The mantra of, "buy Final Draft if you want to be taken seriously," doesn't help either. I'd also rather be writing a screenplay than defining an XML format. For all the reasons it's flawed there are more reasons to imply it's something worth considering. david shute - Nov 19, 2008 at 11:44 AM
Scene A Week: "Involvement in the death of..." Involvement In The Death Of - 3 page scene in PDF format.
david shute - Nov 18, 2008 at 10:33 AM
A fairly straight forward commercial written for a competition with Against Malaria hosted by the Celtx folks. admissions - 2 page commercial shooting script in PDF format
david shute - Nov 17, 2008 at 12:01 PM
I just needed to take a moment to really wrap my head around something. When I finish a project it ends up going in a directory within my writing directory titled [[post mortem]]. Things are then dutifully shifted off to other subdirectories; features, short films, non fiction, etc. Because of the way that I do my projects not everything is always within a neat little Celtx project file. There could images, html, audio, and all manner of other insanity. Because of this when I find a final resting place for my projects they tend to have another directory beneath their appropriate subdirectory. This is always the year followed by the name of the project. Although I have yet to post it 'The First Draft Done' has been a huge project for me this year because it came in conjunction with the majority of the tools it talks about. It was a huge break through for me as it helped identify techniques to help me continue to write at a consistent pace. As much as I'd been aware that these techniques were working it hadn't entirely sunk in until I moved Sid to my post mortem folder. Bearing in mind this is only for projects that have reached some semblance of completion and the years just smacked me in the face. 1994, 2001, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2007. Each one of those dates has a single script completed in that year. Yes, I really had a seven, almost eight, year gap. For 2008, as of right now, I have three completed feature length scripts. With my NaPlWriMo stageplay looking more like it will be a screenplay and that will be four full length scripts this year. That's on top of 'The First Draft Done', 'A Brand New Hell', a couple short scripts, some competition pieces, and my scene a week efforts. When I step back a moment to take it in it's phenomenal. This is the type of consistent writing I've been searching for. I'm glad I've finally found it. It leaves me very eager to see what next year will bring... Aside from a baby of course. david shute - Nov 14, 2008 at 5:54 PM
Superheroes are common place. They have corporate and government sponsorships and, in many cases, have celebrity attached to their names. A vigilante with a distaste for the current situation finds another is out there who feels the same. Instead of quietly performing his part he's thinning the current crop of superhumans. Sid - 109 page screenplay in PDF format
david shute - Nov 13, 2008 at 2:19 PM
It's going to get a little wild with posting around here for the next little bit. I'm on a drive to post all the material I currently have kicking around. In fact, the only thing that is stopping me is the fact that I have to export it all to PDF format first. I will try to balance it out but I do have five feature length scripts and only a short and a commercial to balance it out. Not really much in the way of offering equilibrium. Thursday night is my first night of rehearsals for 'A Brand New Hell'. Very excited to start working with my actors. My lead has been talking about shooting a teaser spot for it. Something that we can possibly use to drum up some interest. I'm very open to the idea. I think it could work out quite well provided it doesn't pull us off course from the actual project at hand. My NaPlWriMo stageplay is coming along. I have a distinct feeling it's not going to turn out how I originally envisioned it. That's okay though. Because of the time constraints I'm going very over the top with it. Whatever I happen to come up with is what's going to happen. Whether it will all be able to happen on the stage or not? That's an excellent question. I've moved the RSS feed icon to the top of the page. Go ahead. Take a look. There it is. The orange one. If you don't know what RSS feeds are or how they work do a quick search and you should get more information than you could possibly need. I've also added one for my Twitter account. For those of you with nothing better to do than read more of my pointless thoughts.Finally there's the icons for my account over at Project Central. That's really just for anyone who actually wants to read through my projects for any of the writing I post here. I intend to add an icon up there for my forum as well. It is currently heavily malnourished as it was originally created for the purpose of conversing with a small group of individuals and the majority of the content is hidden by default. david shute - Nov 12, 2008 at 8:29 PM
Scene A Week: "All sacrifice was condemned." All Sacrifice Was Condemned - 4 page scene in PDF format.
david shute - Nov 11, 2008 at 9:06 PM
Had my first read through with my cast for 'A Brand New Hell' and already I'm very excited. I have a really good group of actors and I think, with a bit of rehearsal, they're going to mesh really well together. It was the full production read through tonight. All five plays, including mine, were read by their respective casts. There's some really great material. I'm particularly interested in seeing the group putting on David Ives 'Words, Words, Words'. Even at the cold read they were hilarious. Three months of polish and they're going to kill. david shute - Nov 6, 2008 at 11:21 PM
One of the things I harp on quite a bit in my book 'The First Draft Done' is finding the appropriate tools to assist in making writing smoother. I'm always trying out new software and putting together my own little custom helper apps. The idea is that your tools and techniques should always be under scrutiny. You should always be looking for better ways to do things. To that end I've been testing out Tomboy as my note taking and organizing system for my NaPlWriMo stageplay attempt. So far its been performing admirably. It offers a very simple and intuitive interface and the integration in to a desktop panel makes access very easy. I'm hoping this will continue to scale well as more notes and ideas come together. I'm fairly confident it will. My only concern is the lack of cross platform support. That concern is fairly marginal at the moment though since I'm spending a disproportionate amount of time working in Ubuntu. It just means that I can't add it to my book until it does breach the cross platform divide reliably. david shute - Nov 5, 2008 at 12:29 PM
'A Brand New Hell' artwork is done. Awesome. I really wanted to keep it simple but distinct. I think I managed to do that while making it pretty badass too. It's something I can picture on a t-shirt looking good. Considering I'm limited to the black and white only for the posters and program I think this was the best way to go. It works for me. Yes, I'm well aware that the stageplay has them mashing wireless controllers and the implications/what I'm using for my production are 360 controllers but the old school NES controller is just iconic. I couldn't picture doing it without having that basic form. I simplified it a bit just to make it flow a little bit better. First read through of all five plays being produced for the January One Acts is being done this Thursday evening. I'm really looking forward to how my cast reads together and to see how the other plays run. I haven't actually read anyones play. I'm more interested to see how they play out. 'The First Draft Done' is finished. Well, the text for it is anyway. I'm fairly comfortable with where it is and have done a number of reads through it myself, out loud twice, to ensure that it's smooth reading. There's the still the fairly large task of putting together a cohesive PDF output and adding the appropriate images but that can wait for another time. I don't have the capacity to tackle that tonight. Once that is done I'll be hosting a copy of the PDF here for availability as well as with the project on the Celtx servers Project Central. Next is to take a quick polish run at 'Sid', work on my NaPlWriMo entry, and start getting 'A Brand New Hell' rehearsal schedule together and get my actors working. david shute - Nov 4, 2008 at 11:37 PM
Scene A Week: "It is the progress of knowledge." It Is The Progress Of Knowledge - 8 page scene in PDF format.
david shute - at 11:31 PM
Auditions and casting calls are all done. I have my cast and I have to say that I'm fairly happy. Our first read through is this coming Thursday. I'm very anxious to hear my script read by other people. I have a feeling that I'm in for a real learning experience over the next three months. I've got a couple of edits coming in to 'A Brand New Hell' before the read through but they will be minor things. A couple bits that have come up lately and some minor tweaks to dialogue and actions. I've also started tossing around some artwork for the show as well. It's getting there but isn't quite ready to go yet. I'll be sure to post it when I do. 'The First Draft Done' will be getting it's final read through this weekend before I put it to bed. That is, to bed until I come back to do the PDF formatting for output. I'm looking to do a proper, easy to read document for it but that's down the line just a little bit. 'Sid' is on the back burner for awhile. I just have to much on my plate to focus on editing it... ... and the reason is because I thought I'd take a stab at NaPlWriMo this year. A 75 page stageplay written exclusively during the month of November. Since it's technically November I should probably get going, huh? I have a few ideas. Looking at a fairly absurd, explotation, B-movie kinda feel for it. The trick will be whether I do the musical aspects that I want. That will depend on whether I have time or not. david shute - Nov 1, 2008 at 1:18 AM |
