Please don't make me make mod posts, they're demeaning and stupid. Read the rules before posting.

That's all, carry on.

Fannish close anaylsis of the lyrics of "Dress Rehearsal Rag" by Leonard Cohen

[Mod hat: so for reference, yes, songwriting does fall under the comm remit if you want to post about lyrics. Poetry too.]

Andrew Rilstone: 9. Reward:
Christopher Vogler's the Writer's Journey uses Hero With a Thousand Faces as a template for Hollywood scriptwriting and has been taken seriously by a lot of people who should know better. He writes:
In his study of world hero myths Campbell discovered that they are all basically the same story - retold endlessly in ( Read more... )

4: Meeting With The Mentor (Star Wars, Joseph Campbell, and plot-building)
Structures and templates can be terribly helpful: of course they can. Every bookshop can sell you a shelf full of books that will teach you the correct structure for a blockbuster novel. And if you don't quite know how to start your masterpiece, then it must be terribly ( Read more... )

A few weeks ago I watched The Joneses, which was a drama/comedy about four people who pretend to be a family in order to subtly sell their neighbours things.

( The character development for the teenagers felt unfinished for me. )

http://reasoningwithvampires.tumblr.com/

A copyeditor takes on the Twilight series. Educational and funny; there's as much value judgment of the personalities of the characters as there is of the general standard of writing (poor), but it's definitely worth a look.

This is a post for discussing elements of craft (pacing, dialogue, characterisation-through-action, editing, etc.) in the recent BBC miniseries Sherlock, written by Steven Moffat, Stephen Thompson, and Mark Gatiss, and directed by Paul McGuigan and Euros Lyn.

What, in your opinion, are scenes that could easily have been removed from a film/book/show and left the story and characterisation wholly intact ( Read more... )