Hegel, the great eighteenth-century German philosopher, maintained that the essence of tragedy derives not from one character being right and the other being wrong, or from the conflict of good versus evil, but from a conflict in which both characters are right, and thus the tragedy is one of “right against right,” being carried to its logical conclusion.

Many times you may feel the urge to sit down and start writing a screenplay but you don’t really know what to write about. So you go looking for a subject. Just know that when you’re looking for your subject, your subject is really looking for you. You’ll find it someplace, at some time, probably when you’re least expecting it. It will be yours to follow through on or not, as you choose.

When you’re in the paradigm, you can’t see the paradigm.

During the writing process you’re going to discover things about yourself you never knew. For example, if you’re writing about something that happened to you, you may re-experience some old feelings and emotions. You may get ‘wacky’ and irritable and live each day as if you were on an emotional roller coaster. Don’t worry. Just keep writing.

The Chinese say that “the longest journey begins with the first step”, and in many philosophical systems “endings and beginnings” are connected; as in the concept of yin and yang, two concentric circles joined together, forever united, forever opposed. If you can find a way to illustrate this in your screenplay, it is to your advantage.

The writer’s job is to write the screenplay and keep the reader turning pages, not to determine how a scene or sequence should be filmed. You don’t have to tell the director and cinematographer and film editor how to do their jobs. Your job is to write the screenplay, to give them enough visual information so they can bring those words on the page into life, in full ‘sound and fury,’ revealing strong visual and dramatic action, with clarity, insight, and emotion.

What’s great about writing a screenplay is that the subtext of the scene, what is not said, can sometimes be more important that what is said. Again, dialogue serves two basic functions in the scene: Either it moves the story forward or it reveals information about the character.

Joseph Campbell reflects in The Power of Myth that in mythic terms, the first part of any journey of initiation must deal with the death of the old self and the resurrection of the new. Campbell says that the hero, or heroic figure, ’moves not into outer space but into inward space, to the place from which all being comes, into the consciousness that is the source of all things, the kingdom of heaven within. The images are outward, but their reflection is inward.

There is only now, today, this present moment, this point in time. Waiting for ‘someday’ is, like striving for perfection, really just an excuse. ‘Someday’ is a concept that, to quote my mentor, Jean Renoir ’exists only in the mind, not in reality.

All drama is conflict. Without conflict, you have no action; without action, you have no character; without character, you have no story; and without story, you have no screenplay.