“From Robert De Niro, I learned not to force anything. Not to force your idea of how something should be and then go from there. Not, ‘Oh, this should be funny,’ or ‘Oh, I'm going make you cry.’ That's the wrong thing. You just need to think about th...

“Yo, Adrian!”

If there’s one thing I know about screenwriters, they love the process of pitching their movie ideas to industry professionals.

Crafting memorable characters is the first step in writing engaging short stories. As the reader, we are choosing to spend a brief period of time inside the head of the main character, going on an emotional ride with them that may bring us a new pers...

“One of the main things I’ve learned from Shonda [Rhimes] is to focus on what you really want to see, yourself, in a season. Not necessarily what should happen. I remember on Scandal, in the writers room, we would craft what we thought were these per...

“Tennis is an amazing sport to think about a love triangle because it’s so deeply charged erotically," says Justin Kuritzkes, screenwriter for the new film Challengers, starring Zendaya. "Tennis is a game that’s so steeped in repression, but also in ...

“We had to go back to the ratings board five times. It was a long journey. You have to laugh sometimes because we had some really grotesque imagery in our film. We even have a demon phallus in the film and nobody was worried about that. It was really...

While both short stories and novels share the goal of engaging the reader in dynamic, thought-provoking storytelling, there are several significant differences between the two forms.

There are many reasons to outline your short story before you write it. Probably the most compelling reason to create an outline is to help you keep the story focused and avoid going on tangents that may not serve the story.