Marilyn Horowitz on... STRUCTURE

http://www.marilynhorowitz.com/

Screenwriters are obsessed with structure. Bill Goldman said once the three things you need to know about screenwriting are structure, structure and structure. And so structuring a screenplay is really the first thing you're taught because screenplays, unlike fiction, happen in a certain amount of time and a certain number of things have to happen in that amount of time or you don't have something that walks, talks and smells like a screenplay.
So Syd Fields wrote a wonderful book in which he gave writers sort of the first insight about how they could just do this. And I think it was a wonderfully helpful book. Not for everyone, and it didn't really -- it was complete enough for me. What I found was that when writers would use his system they would kind of try to force their characters to fit into the plot and that made a tremendous amount of difficulty especially in rewriting because it wasn't organic, you know. And when characters behave out of character we know that. You can't fool us.
So the idea that you had to find a way to structure the screenplay that seemed more plastic or juicy really became what I understood as a reason why the myth in turning map and structure into something new.

Marilyn Horowitz, the author of "How to Write a Screenplay in 10 Weeks" and creator of The Horowitz System™, is an award-winning university teacher, a producer, a screenwriter, a script consultant and a successful writing coach. Her students include published novelists, screenwriters and award-winning filmmakers. Her website is: http://www.marilynhorowitz.com/

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• structure
• screenwriting
• screenplays
• william
• goldman
• movie
• scripts

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Cool use of medifore!