![]() ![]() ![]() She is the author of six books that help the writer learn her trademarked writing system, including editions for college, high school, and middle school. Professor Horowitz has created a revolutionary system that yields a new, more effective way of writing. In 2004 she received the coveted New York University Award for Teaching Excellence. She is also a judge for the Fulbright Scholarship Program for film and media students. Since 1998 she has taught thousands of aspiring screenwriters to complete a feature length screenplay using her method. She has a passion for helping novices get started. Marilyn Horowitz is an award-winning New York University professor, author, producer, and Manhattan-based writing consultant, who works with successful novelists, produced screenwriters, and award-winning filmmakers. Using the questions will help you do that. Audiences don't want to see films that are like everyday life but rather, larger than life. However, we must overcome this, because our job as writers is to look for conflict and to amplify it. Why do we so often dilute the tension or suspense that writing real conflict generates? Simple - we're trained to avoid conflict in real life, so we naturally try to minimize the conflicts in our scripts. As they eat dinner in a restaurant, each seemingly mundane event (sitting down, ordering, being served) is loaded, because it all leads up to the climax. For example, in The Godfather, Michael wants to murder the Turk, who wants to make a drug deal. Question: But how do I make the right decision as to what to rewrite or cut?Īnswer: By identifying the conflict in the scene, and determining what each character wants. What the writer should have done was start the scene after the waitperson left, and stayed with the characters until the conflict was resolved. When the waitperson finally leaves, the writer summarizes the conflict of the scene in a line or two. I often read drafts which include a two-page scene of the characters dining at a restaurant. Now ask yourself if you have dramatized the moments where there is the most conflict? Did you stay in the scene with the characters until they resolved it, or cut away to a new scene just as the previous one got juicy? If you look at each scene as a sequence, it will give you the overview you need for correct assessment. While there are many elements involved with this process, having the right place to start saves much confusion and time.Īn effective way to begin is to imagine that every scene has a moment before it began and a moment after and each one of these is a separate scene, and so each of your scenes becomes part of a larger whole, called a sequence. Every week we workshop each student's pages and I give a talk about an aspect of rewriting. Many take the class several times to support and speed their rewriting progress. In my private class, students write a screenplay, revise the draft and complete their script in 9-week cycles. Here's how it works: As you read through your draft, at the beginning of each scene, ask yourself, have I dramatized and summarized the right parts of the story? While the concepts of summarizing and dramatizing are not new, their application will help you get a handle on the work that needs to be done in a fresh and fun way. Finding the right question to ask, one that allows you to evaluate each part of your screenplay, is the key. ![]() To be clear, I’m not advocating for replacing the “Summarize this Topic” button this suggestion is for an additional feature, not a replacement.We often need a single organizing principle to act as a compass as we navigate through our own work and pinpoint what needs rewriting. The existing “summarize this topic” button is helpful in those situations to some degree, but it still requires a lot of reading and can’t sum things up nearly as well as a human might be able to. Any sort of long-running discussion where it’s difficult for a new participant to understand the discussion without reading everything.Long discussions on feature proposals: document community consensus, and the current point the discussion is at.Product support questions: add answer / progress in finding answer.That got me thinking though: what if Discourse allowed users to create community-editable summaries of long, popular threads? This would be useful in all sorts of situations, such as: I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the button instead allowed me to view a condensed version of the discussion with some posts hidden. I initially thought that this button would allow me to write a summary of the topic which others could read. Recently while reading a long topic on Discourse with many posts, I came across the “Summarize this Topic” button.
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