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| Acknowledgments | |
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| Introduction | |
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| Storytelling | |
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| Idea | |
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| You have not written something you care about! | |
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| Your idea isn't vibrating with originality! | |
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| You picked the wrong genre! | |
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| Your story is only interesting to you! | |
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| Your story is about miserable people who are miserable the whole time and end miserably! Or worse!! | |
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| You haven't spent enough time thinking up a fantastic title! | |
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| Character | |
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| You picked the wrong main character! | |
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| You haven't constructed your main character correctly! | |
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| You are not specific about EVERYTHING when you create a character! | |
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| You haven't made "place" a character in your story! | |
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| We have no rooting interest in your hero! | |
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| Your opponent is not a human being! | |
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| Your Bad Guy isn't great! | |
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| The opponent is not the hero's agent of change! | |
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| The Bad Guy doesn't feel he's the hero of his own movie! | |
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| You don't give your bad guy a Bad Guy Speech! | |
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| Your characters do stupid things to move the story forward, a.k.a. they do stuff because you make them! | |
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| Your minor characters don't have character! | |
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| Structure | |
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| You worried about structure when you came up with your story! | |
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| You don't have enough tension! | |
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| You have no time pressure! | |
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| You don't give the reader enough emotion! | |
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| You bungled your story structure! | |
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| You have not done, and then redone, and REDONE, a one-line outline! | |
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| You have not done a "random thoughts" outline! | |
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| You have not used the Kerith Harding Rule of Drama! | |
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| Your B story does not affect your A story! | |
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| You don't use Set Up and Pay Off to your advantage! | |
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| You haven't buried exposition like Jimmy Hoffa! | |
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| You don't withhold surprises until as late as possible! | |
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| Scenes | |
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| You haven't pounded each scene enough! | |
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| Your scenes don't turn the action! | |
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| You don't have enough reversals! | |
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| You have not shouted at each scene, "How can I jack up the conflict?!" | |
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| You have not used the incredible power of rhyming scenes to your advantage! | |
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| You haven't cut the first and last lines from as many scenes as possible! | |
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| Your character does research when she could be talking to somebody! | |
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| Your characters talk on the phone too much! | |
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| You have not made every scene memorable! | |
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| Dialogue | |
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| You don't keep a log of overheard dialogue! | |
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| You haven't separated the characters' voices! | |
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| You haven't worked your dialogue hard enough! | |
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| You didn't A-B the dialogue! | |
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| You have Q & A dialogue! | |
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| You have characters speaking text but not subtext! | |
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| You did too much research! | |
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| You didn't do enough research! | |
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| Physical Writing | |
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| Welcome to Writing | |
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| You aren't educated in your chosen storytelling medium! | |
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| You're using the wrong writing instrument! | |
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| Your prose is not CRYSTAL CLEAR! | |
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| Format | |
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| You don't understand screenplay format! | |
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| You have naked sluglines or no sluglines at all! | |
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| You over-direct your actors! | |
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| You use parentheticals wrong! | |
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| Characters | |
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| You change character names on us! | |
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| Too many of your characters have names! | |
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| Character names begin with the same letter! or WORSE, they RHYME! | |
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| You do not describe main characters with a concise, telling, two (or so) sentence character description! | |
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| Scene Description | |
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| You use novelistic language! | |
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| You poisoned your scene description with "to be"! | |
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| You haven't cut as many "thes" and "thats" as possible! | |
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| You don't put the most important word at the end of the sentence! | |
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| You describe dialogue in scene description! | |
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| You have not paid attention to image order in scene description! | |
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| You haven't cut scene description to the bone! | |
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| Rewriting | |
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| Don't repeat! Anything! Ever! | |
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| You rewrite while you write! | |
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| You do a rewrite by reading the whole script at once! | |
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| You don't have a killer first page! | |
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| You blew your first ten pages! ARGGGGGHHHH! | |
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| You haven't ripped out the first twenty pages! | |
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| You haven't cut every bit of extraneous action! | |
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| You think your first (or ninth) draft is perfect! | |
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| Picky, Picky, Picky | |
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| You don't know the meaning of every word in your script! | |
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| You use numbers instead of words! | |
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| You call shots! | |
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| You call specific songs! | |
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| You didn't run your spellcheck, you moron! | |
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| You trust your spellcheck! Ah haa ha haaa ha ha! | |
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| You think longer is better! | |
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| You didn't read your script out loud! | |
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| You used a crummy printer! | |
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| What Now? | |
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| Don't Be a Jackass, Be Professional | |
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| You want to be famous more than you want to write! | |
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| You think your script is special and rules don't apply! | |
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| You put the wrong stuff on your title page! | |
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| You haven't done a table read! | |
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| You're dying to send the script out before you're really, really ready! | |
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| The Industry | |
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| You haven't the first clue how the business works! | |
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| You don't know what time they eat lunch in Hollywood! | |
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| Your sense of entitlement is in overdrive! a.k.a. "Don't fight the notes!" | |
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| You don't know what a decent query letter is! | |
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| You made boneheaded demands in your query letter! | |
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| You don't want to sign their release! | |
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| Angst-O-Rama | |
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| You think Hollywood will steal your idea! | |
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| You don't understand Hanlon's Razor! | |
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| You don't know the difference between Natalie Merchant and Patti Smith! | |
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| You don't know you can write your way out of a hole! | |
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| You don't know how to get an agent! | |
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| You get excited when they say they like it! | |
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| You're confusing hope with denial! | |
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| Fading Out | |
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| About the Author | |