Judging a contest in NYC. Did first group of 14 scenes today. A bit appalled -- 11 of them were written with a fiction writing sensibility, not a screenwriting sensibility. This is what happens when I judge -- most writers don't know what screenwriting IS. Why?
One reason they go so wrong is they use the wrong models ... shooting scripts, old scripts with earlier rhetorical values. If you can write a lean and mean contemporary spec script, man, you are immediately in the top ten percent! Everybody else is shooting themselves in the foot.
How to tell a story
