Establishing good habits

Although bad habits are more interesting, establishing good habits will really improve your own writing.  Another tip which has helped enormously with my work has been to read a few pages of a script a day, doesn’t take much effort at all and can be done in your lunch hour, on your commute, or whenever you have the time to spare.

Simply Scripts is my normal go to resource bank, not only do they have movie and TV scripts but anime, Oscar winning scripts, treatments, plays, musicals etc, I can’t recommend it more highly.  I’ve been keeping my eye on TV scripts mainly as this is my preferred mode of broadcast, but its interesting to see the collection they have and to dip in and out of various genres.

Why bother?

This technique allows you to see the language and flow of the script, also some scripts contain scenes which didn’t make it to screen, so a good opportunity to see why they could’ve left this scene out (so therefore helpful during your own editing phase).

It’s always surprised me that sometimes the most powerful scenes represented visually, have the most basic of writing on the script. This is something I will touch upon in a later blog post about needless dialogue.

I need to ramp this up a notch this week by printing the script and watching it alongside the show. So this week I am planning to watch is Stranger Things and view it alongside the script I’ve heard such great things about this series (IMDb 8.9/10) that I can’t let another season go without checking it out – as a kid of the 80’s I’m sure to like it.