If you’re a writer you are familiar with the word. You just wrote an Academy Award-quality screenplay or an Emmy-quality series development, put together a solid pitch, gave it to the producer or exec with passion, and he or she responded with the most painful one-word epithet in the English language—Pass.
I’m asked questions all the time about pitching animated TV series. Do I need a bible? — Do I need a pilot script? — Do I need artwork? —Do I need a few minutes of animation? Rather than tell you what I think you need, let me illustrate the reality of pitching with two personal anecdotes...
Have you ever been writing and felt like your story is crap? If you haven’t you must not be an experienced writer. If you have, don’t worry, crap has some useful nutrients in it. Let me explain...
You don’t need to go to film school and pay thousands of dollars for screenwriting classes. All you need to do is some reading. Let me tell you which books I found to be the most helpful...
If you are an aspiring screenwriter I have some suggestions that may help you break into the business...
If you’re a writer who wants to improve the quality of your story, or a producer who wants your film to have the best possible chance at the box office, I've got 10 writing maxims for you that will maximize your chances of success...
So what is a writer’s #1 creative tool? Experience? Education? Vocabulary? Scriptwriting software? Jack Daniels? It’s none of these. The #1 creative tool of every writer is...
Much has been written about the subject of BE-DO-HAVE in the self-help arena. But applying it to screenwriting can be very helpful as well.
Emmy-winning writer Jeffrey Scott’s acclaimed book, How To Write For Animation, has just been released for the Kindle and other eBook formats
Theme is the most important element of any screenplay. It aligns and focuses the plot, subplots, characters and dialogue. It is the Rosetta stone which allows you to translate that great concept you have into a great screenplay. But that’s not all it does...
I recently went to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and looked at dozens of pencil drawings by Gustav Klimt. Surprisingly, I made an interesting mental connection with screenplay outlines: A pencil drawing visualizing what is going to be painted is to an oil what a screenplay is to a film.
My book, How To Write For Animation, has just been released for the Kindle and other eBook formats. Read what Jeffrey Katzenberg, Stan Lee and others have to say about it.
CharactersEngage.com Interviews Jeffrey Scott: Can Characters Have Universal Appeal?
Congratulations to all my friends at Reliance Animation for winning the 2012 FICCI BAF Award for "Best Animated TV Episode"!
Every screenwriter is born with an amazing writing tool. It’s called the human mind. But if you don’t know how to use it effectively you could be wasting a lot of creative potential. I’ve found a very special way to resolve creative story problems that I think you’ll find very useful...
Wish it wasn’t so damned hard to write a great screenplay? Wish no more! Emmy-winning writer Jeffrey Scott reviews THE CORE ELEMENTS screenplay writing method.
The secret to great screenplay writing is keeping it simple and visual. Words can be your friends as well as your deadliest enemy. Here’s a short tip that will improve your writing with every word you don’t write.
When I’m not writing important blog posts I’m writing frivolous stuff like feature films. Earlier this year I had the pleasure of working with Chris Moujaes, the Director of Original Entertainment at FUNimation Entertainment, and producer April Bennett on Electronic Arts/Bioware’s animated feature film, Dragon Age: Dawn of the Seeker...
There is no precise definition of what writer’s block is. Most likely, it’s just the terror of staring at a blank page or screen and thinking that the next words that come out of your cranial matter have got to be Oscar quality. Whatever it is, it’s really not that hard to handle. Over the years I have found three effective ways to get past whatever is blocking my creativity...
I’m going to use this post to vent a little—but also to make a point specifically for the benefit of all the producers around the world who want to make animated features.
Ever get a big fish on the line only to have it get away before you could pull it into the boat? You probably didn’t set the hook. Rule #1 in fishing: set the hook. The same is true in screenwriting, only you’re not trying to hook a fish, you’re trying to hook the audience. You don’t need a fishing rod, you need ten great pages.
Self promotion turned out to be the hottest topic yet on my blog. My three posts on the subject are approaching 6,000 reads! I have received dozens of comments, both on the blog and at LinkedIn, over 95% of which were in agreement that self-promotion is vitally important. You get it! That's good! Here's what I got...
Does self-promotion really work? What happens when you promote your writing via blog, Facebook and LinkedIn? Over the past several weeks I’ve done just that. The results are in. Check out this post and find out exactly what happened with my experiment in self-promotion...
I got a huge response to my last post, Why Do Many Artists & Writers Hate Self-Promotion?, including several active discussions on various LinkedIn groups. Self-promotion is a very hot topic! Many of the people who commented on the post talked about their shyness, self-doubts, the unworthiness of their creativity, and other barriers to promoting themselves and their work. One of the biggest concerns was whether or not self-promotion was really effective. Well, let's find out...
A funny thing happened on the way to my Facebook page. A handful of professional contacts refused to be my friend, not because they didn’t like me, but because they weren’t on Facebook. The interesting thing was that they seemed to take pride in not being on Facebook. This reminded me of something I’ve noticed over my career, an odd anomaly about many writers and artists: They don’t like to promote themselves. Not a good idea!
