Every writer knows the meaning of the word "unmotivated." Some days, it's just an uphill slog to find the energy to even approach the keyboard, much less get actual words on a page.

If you're a new screenwriter you might be wondering what a spec script is. Well, it's spelled S-P-E-C, it's pronounced "speck" and it stands for "speculation."

Chekhov's Gun was intended to be advice for playwrights and novelists, from a writer working in a time before there even were movie theaters and televisions.

It's seemingly one of the simplest tasks connected with screenwriting. In comparison to writing an entire TV pilot or feature-length script, it's a minor chore, something to be dashed off hurriedly at the last moment when suddenly required. I'm talki...

During my screenwriting education, we were urged to avoid the use of narrators in our scripts. There was a good reason for this: "baby writers" tend to over-rely on narrators to provide easy exposition or bypass actual character development as they s...

INT. or EXT.? DAY or NIGHT? The choices of what information to include in a scene heading appear to be limited, making it seemingly one of the easiest elements of a script to dash off quickly so you can move on to the meatier stuff of scenes and char...

As a former screenwriting student and now as a current screenwriting instructor, one of the most common problems I've seen writers struggle with is the middle of their script. I stopped keeping track years ago of how many times I encountered a screen...