Quoted from Ayham " A two-story Spanish building split in the middle by a brick path. The front section has a front yard and four units, two on each side. Then the path leads to a courtyard, and to the back section, which has six more units, three on each side. "

Is the building of Spanish design?  Or is it filled with Spanish people?

You could just say it's a medium-sized partment building with a large court yard.  Unless there's a reason for the specific number of units you're mentioning.  Don't mention it.


Phil

Phil, it's a Spanish design building... I finally came up with the design of the building which has alot to do with my story..here's what I came up with:

THE CONFIGURATION OF FAREED?S BUILDING
A two-story Spanish building split in the middle by a brick path. The front section has a front yard and four units, two on each side. Then the path leads to a courtyard, and to the rear section, which has eight more units, four on each side.

Fareed?s apartment is on the second level to the right, and has a small patio looking over the courtyard, next to it is Mrs Goldstein?s unit, across from them is the Kuwan?s, a Korean family, and next to the Kuwan?s is the Jackson?s, a black couple.

Phil, that's how I described the building, even though we haven't really met any of the neighbors yet! Like Mrs Goldstein or the Kuan family...does that make sense at all? to name certain characters before they appear in the story?

Regarding the design of configuration, I'm a real estate appraiser and got lucky recently by finding this building in Compton! I think it would work.

VAUGHN,

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. It has been a great experience to read how other writers approach the Writing Process, a great learning experience actually. Thank you again.

Ayham

Could someone please tell me how do you guys do this QUOTE thing?? do you highlight a phrase and click quote or what? I'm only able to quote the whole reply but can't figure out how to quote only certain sections! I feel I'm a retard when it comes to these things!

If you mean to quote a small part, respond to it, and then quote another part further down the line, you have to enter the code before and after the section you want to quote further down the line.

Hope that makes sense

Just delete what is in between the code if you don't want it there.

i cant get started on anything... i'd love to come up with a cool series but everything keeps running into dead ends. i'm trying to go back to basics and "write what you know" but still for the last couple days i've spent a painful amount of time staring at a blank page.

it sucks to be unimaginitve.

Quoted from Shelton If you mean to quote a small part, respond to it, and then quote another part further down the line, you have to enter the code before and after the section you want to quote further down the line. Hope that makes sense

Mike, I think I got it, but now that I saw what you " taken just before breakfast " I forgot everything   

That was very helpful, thank you.

You're welcome.

And what can I say?  She insisted on spending the night.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14945362/site/newsweek/

I thought you guys might find this article interesting, by the guy who wrote " Basic Instinct " you know, that movie when Sharon Stone does that thing with her legs...? yeah?...remember?...Of course you do!!

I've been really interested in picking that book up actually.  I must say I love the mention of Chayefsky in the beginning of the article.

Paddy Chayefsky was awesome.

Glad you liked it Mike.

Ok, you guys I'm gonna go out on a limb here, so bare with me please. This has to do with the Writing Process and with all the thoughts you shared in this thread.
An idea is developing in my head, and I don't want it, I'm trying to push it away but it keeps coming back ever more forcefully time and time again. I don't want it because I'm in the middle of writing a screenplay and I'm really trying hard with this one because it might see the light of day, and not sit for years in a lost folder in this old computer of mine. And that's how it all started... You see, I'm writing this screenplay with a co-writer...a woman co-writer...a BLOND woman co-writer. So, last week and as I was driving home at night after a stormy writing session, thinking of the best and less painful way to kill myself, an idea, or a thought popped into my head, right before jumping off the freeway. And this thought was: " Women, specifically blond women, are different than us, men. They think and act very different. " End of thought.
So I stopped from killing myself, for a moment, well I actually had to go home and use the restroom, didn't wanna say, excuse me, god, I need to take a leak before you send me to hell.

So once I got that important part out of the way, that same thought came back to me, and this time it was: " We call these creatures, Women. They're built, and packaged differently than us. Sometimes we love them, sometimes we hate them, and most of the times we have no clue what to do with them." end of second thought.

But this time it was different, this time I imagined a person, a man saying this to another man, and from there, the thoughts started jumping into this weird head of mine (cheap hair cut).

And here's what I came up with. Synopsis:
* Two nerds. One from Earth, one from space. Set out to save the planet...and have sex."


A man is sitting at night in his back yard, in a small, rural town, watching a falling star, feeling very romantic as he watches the star getting closer and closer, thinking about a woman who keeps rejecting his advances.
But something very strange happens, the falling star keeps falling...closer...closer...scaring him to death as it finally lands into his own back yard!
The man is scared to death, not sure what to do. He looks at this object and it turns out to be a UFO!
Very strange, very weird looking UFO, armed to the teeth.
The man is not sure what to do, he's freaking out. He turns to run inside to call the police, but he hears something. A door is opening. He looks and finds himself face to face with an ALIEN (this is a comedy by the way)
The alien, dressed in a space suit and has an over-sized head. He looks just like us, well, most us humans, except for the large head.

Now, the alien ( lets imagine him as a young Robin William, when he was funny) and lets imagine the earth man as...um, Jim Cary?...So this alien walks out of the ship, and we can immediately tell this is NOT your typical alien like we see in the movies, think of him as your nerdy-type alien. He trips and fall the second he steps to the ground, and drops his laser weapon. He's clumsy. He forgets things...And here's his story;
The ship was part of an alien invasion; it's a scout ship on a mission that had gone wrong. The ship was supposed to be invisible once it hit Earth atmosphere, but technical problems caused it to fall in the sky. The crew became unconscious and is now in a hibernated state. Only one crewmember made it, Robin, who is actually the cook on that ship, a totally clueless space cook.
So Robin tells Jim about the invasion plan. He tells him that the scouting mission was to determine that conditions are ripe on Earth for the big invasion, and by that he means that if Earth people were not united as one, then it would make the invasion easier, they would take Earth one country after the other. But if they were united as one, then the invasion would be cancelled because the Earth, united, is too pwerful.

Also, we will find out more about those aliens, one part in particular is that their, uh, private parts are extremely tiny! Because they stopped having sex for thousands of years, because sex and the pursuit of sex causes people to lose focus on science and other important things in life. So they eliminated it, and in the process, women were eliminated also from that planet (including my co-writer) and that caused their heads to grow. And their private parts to shrink. So they became smarter (they have babies through artificial injections)

So now, at this point, we have two nerds, one from space, one from earth, going at it. Jim, trying to give Robin an idea about life on Earth. He descibes women to him by telling him that they're built, and packaged differently. But Robin is extremely fascinated with the women species, he had never seen one in his entire life.

Robin develops certain super-human powers since he's on Earth. He tells Jim that the only way to foil the invasion plans is for Earth people to unite. So they both set out to unite Earth. In the mean time, an evil scientist who somehow found out about this whole thing, decides to try and wake up the hibernated aliens and use them for his..uh, evil stuff. He has no use of Robin since he's only a cook!

Other things are happening. Robin will fall in love with a knock-out blond (my co-writer) but his, you know, private part, is so damn tiny, he's embarrassed with himself.

Finally, Robin and Jim will unite the people of earth, and the evil doctor will be defeated, and Robin's tiny private part will finally grow and will have wild sex with my co-writer and GET HER OFF MY BACK!!!

This is it! Now you see how my writing process develops.

You guys should take a look at this;

Friday, September 29, 2006

A FEW PIECES ON DIALOGUE


Leaving our discussion of character for a while, to be returned
to soon.  Thought I'd do a little piece, or a few pieces on
dialogue ? since one of the Million-Dollar Screenwriting gang
just requested same by email...

...so...dialogue.  

First, let's dispense w/the idea that it should be
"Natural" ...or "conversational".  

It should SEEM natural and conversational. But it probably
ISN'T that way, if it's any good. Would you send out the
rough draft of screenplay or let anyone else read it?

You shouldn't.  

And ALL day-to-day, real life conversation is a ROUGH DRAFT.  We
don't have the opportunity to edit what we say off the cuff in
conversation.  Ever heard of "l'esprit de l'escalier"?
It's a French expression that translates as "the spirit of
the staircase", that thought that occurs to you after the
argument inside, when you're leaving, on the staircase, an
idea comes to you, where you think "THAT'S what I SHOULD
have said!"  

Well, that's a REWRITE, my friend.  

A dialogue polish in real life.  And THAT'S the line that goes
in the screenplay.  Our characters are a little better than we
are, they speak a little better, get to the point quicker,
distill it more eloquently than we do.  We can have a three-hour
pointless conversation, but we shouldn't film it.

So, it sounds like real conversation, but it's really
conversation DISTILLED.  Just as drama is life w/the boring
parts removed, so dialogue is talk with the bad lines removed
and the good lines heightened, ok?  Trust me, no one's going
to say "This dialogue's just too good, I don't believe
it."  They're going to say "This is great."  You should
have such problems.  

Ok then.

Let's begin a dialogue about?dialogue.

What's it got to do?  What is dialogue for?  I'd say it has
two purposes:

A. To advance story
B. To reveal character

And by the way, great when you can do both at once.  One of my
last passes for a dialogue polish is always to say "Well, this
line is already advancing story, how can it also reveal
character?"  Or vice-versa, but personally my problem is
usually the former.  

And let me share with you, at this juncture, my first rule of
writing dialogue, or the first pointer I give my students:

"Don't."

That is, when you can avoid it, when you've got a way to SHOW
rather than tell, do that, do that, DO THAT.  

Remember, dialogue is the icing on the cake. Make sure that you
have a cake first, which, in this analogy, is a great story with
great characters.  And then, apply icing ? it would serve at
this point to say that they DID make great movies WITHOUT any
dialogue back in the silent era, but they never made any without
good stories or good characters, did they?  So, you don't need
dialogue to be great, do you?

That said, we don't make silent movies anymore...so you're
probably going to have to the characters say something,
sometime.  But remember, you can tell an entire story without it
and it CAN be almost all character...if you see Reservoir Dogs
for instance, Quentin Tarantino goes wild with the pop culture
references and the story is mainly carried in the actions of the
characters ?-

-- when Mr. Blonde is preparing to torture the hostage police
officer, he doesn't SAY:  "I'm going to torture you.
First I'll douse you gasoline, which will scare you, but
what's even worse is, I'm going to cut off your ear."

No.

He turns up the radio and he talks about what's playing
on the radio and dances around the warehouse with a jerry can of
gasoline and a straight-razor. And it's all the scarier
thereby.  If you watch the DVD, QT's commentary talks a lot
about how the characters don't talk about the story.  

Another great study in dialogue to me, is David Mamet's HEIST.
You virtually can't discern the story if you're only
listening to the dialogue.  It's a caper film ? there's a
whole plan, but it's virtually never mentioned...then it goes
off and various factions fight each other for the loot, but that
too, is never said.

So, in those two, the dialogue is virtually ALL character.  

But, a word of caution.  Heist, directed by David Mamet from his
own script, almost certainly set up with financing and all
beforehand, perhaps with Gene Hackman attached.  Reservoir Dogs,
self-financed by QT till the eleventh hour when his agents got
him more cash, Harvey Keitel and bunch of other goodies.

Neither one was set up as a spec script.  They didn't come in
from unknown writers and get the quick "once-over" from some
agent's assistant who ONLY READS the dialogue (if that).  

So, I might urge you to have your characters talk a little bit
more about the story as it goes on ? or at least not to bury
the most important story details in narration, where they risk
being missed.  You'll want to strike a balance where, yes, we
can get the gist of the story from the dialogue alone ? and
the story's a powerhouse when we read every word ? which
we'll do, because the dialogue will make us WANT to do.  

So...dialogue so far:

Distill and intensify it.  Show, don't tell when possible.
Balance it between story and character.  

More coming...

Thanks "A Million",

Chris Soth
http://www.getresponse.com/t/3008291/556840/156856012/
http://www.MillionDollarScreenwriting.com/blog
http://www.getresponse.com/t/3008292/556840/156856012/

Chris Soth

" There are a handful of members, here, who know English as a second language, Helio, Michel and Bert are a few of them.  We learn to overlook the 'mistranslations' for these people.  For those of us who know English, we are not as forgiving. "


Phil


Phil, I quoted you on this one from Helio's post of his short script, didn't wanna comment on it there, so I wouldn't fill that section with unrelated materials.

Regarding members who know English as a second language, which includes me as well. I don't think we should learn to overlook their mistranslations. I think when a foreign writer decides to use the English language as a medium to convey his thoughts to others, he or she must be in good, or acceptable command of this medium, or this language, or at least try hard to be, otherwise what's the point of writing in English? And I must add here that it takes me twice as long to produce a screenplay, that's acceptable in terms of English, than it would take a native speaker, because I truly put alot of effort in proofing it for proper English, and I think everyone else should do the same.

Bert's English is a second language??!!! geez! He's better than my English teacher!!