For most writers, the knowledge they gain from reading and study equals or outweighs experience, especially if that experience goes unexamined.

Show, don’t tell” means respect the intelligence and sensitivity of your audience.

The substance of story is the gap that splits open between what a human being expects to happen when he takes an action and what really does happen; the rift between expectation and result, probability and necessity. To build a scene, we constantly break open these breaches in reality.

We must believe, or as Samuel Taylor Coleridge suggested, we must willingly suspend our disbelief.

No one needs yet another recipe book on how to reheat Hollywood leftovers. We need a rediscovery of the underlying tenets of our art, the guiding principles that liberate talent. No matter where a film is made – Hollywood, Paris, Hong Kong – if it’s of archetypal quality, it triggers a global and perpetual chain reaction of pleasure that carries it from cinema to cinema, generation to generation.

We often see films with a cast of excellent characters... except one, who’s dreadful. We wonder why until we realize that the writer hates this character. He’s trivializing and insulting this role at every opportunity. And I’ll never understand this. How can a writer hate his own character? It’s his baby. How can he hate what he gave life? Embrace all your creations, especially the bad people. They deserve love like everyone else.

A storyteller puts a friendly arm around the audience, saying: “Let me show you something.

When you think about it, going to the movies is bizarre. Hundreds of strangers sit in a blackened room, elbow to elbow, for two or more hours. They don’t go to the toilet or get a smoke. Instead, they stare wide-eye at a screen, investing more uninterrupted concentration than they give to work, paying money to suffer emotions they’d do anything to avoid in life.

Fact, no matter how minutely observed, is truth with a small “t.” Big “T” Truth is located behind, beyond, inside, below the surface of things, holding reality together or tearing it apart, and cannot be directly observed.

The PROTAGONIST has a conscious desire.