Charlie Schmidlin of IndieWire has shared a great video of a roundtable discussion, put together by The Hollywood Reporter, with some of the top showrunners working in television today (Scripts for many of the shows mentioned are linked to below):
With the surplus of quality series currently on cable television, there are also the notable names and personalities behind them — “Mad Men” and Matthew Weiner, D.B. Weiss and “Game of Thrones,” Aaron Sorkin and “The Newsroom.” All are articulate, enjoyable, and insightful, and thanks to the coming Emmy season, a roundtable with them and others has hit the web.
The latest in a long line of THR’s Roundtable series, the 55-minute Emmy discussion includes Weiner, Sorkin, Weiss, and also Alex Gansa (“Homeland”), Kevin Williamson (“The Following”), and Beau Willimon (“House of Cards”).Together, the group discusses their writing processes, violence in TV, and the personality types that enter the business. The diverse slate of shows that each showrunner represents means a varied back-and-forth over their approaches, content, and with guys like Sorkin and Weiner in the room, some choice quotes as well (“I’ve never seen an episode of ‘The West Wing‘ beyond season four,” says Sorkin.)
Today I present to you five award-winning screenwriters discussing their approach to the craft of screenwriting. You may want to get a snack or even a small meal because some of these videos are long, but all of them offer unique insights into how each of these writers (or writing teams) approach a story, and then break the story down into screenplay format. Hopefully, these videos will educate and inspire you as you work on your own screenwriting craft.
I love writing but hate starting. The page is awfully white and it says, “You may have fooled some of the people some of the time but those days are over, giftless. I’m not your agent and I’m not your mommy, I’m a white piece of paper, you wanna dance with me?” and I really, really don’t. I’ll go peaceable-like.
A new article in Nature.com discusses a study that shows scientific papers that are initially rejected ultimately have a greater impact in the long run:
Just had your paper rejected? Don’t worry — that might boost its ultimate citation tally. An excavation of scientific papers’ usually hidden prepublication trajectories from journal to journal has found that papers published after having first been rejected elsewhere receive significantly more citations on average than ones accepted on first submission.
Of course, scientific papers aren’t screenplays, but the trend holds true.
Rejection is an essential part of the writing process. Your ideas, your individual scenes, and your lines of dialogue will all be picked at and turned down countless times before your screenplay is ultimately accepted. But those mini and major rejections shouldn’t get you down — they should empower you to learn from what you’ve done so far and press forward.
Aaron Sorkin is a widely renowned screenwriter, television writer, and playwright. He’s the creative force behind such political classics as A Few Good Men, The American President, and The West Wing. He’s known for his crisp, stylized dialogue (and for his Sorkinisms). Aaron Sorkin is Hollywood elite. He’s been nominated for the Academy award for his adaption of Moneyball (with Steve Zaillian) and won the Oscar for The Social Network. He’s also won several Emmy awards for The West Wing.
This amazing compilation of “Sorkinisms” is a prime example of how a writer can and should steal from himself. If you’ve got a great line or scene in a script that’s stuck in a drawer, don’t let it go to waste. Use that sucker again and again. It will work every time. Just follow Sorkin’s example:
LA Screenwriter 