LIKE PLAYING PROJECT RUNWAY WITH A UNIVERSE
There's that old cliche about writers being intimidated by the blank page before them. Too many possibilities. It's all wide open. Where to begin. Etc. That's why constraints are awesome. And not just the plush and leather kind available at that place down the street you claim you've never been to.
Ridley Scott's putting out this anthology, Parallel Lines, in which all the filmmakers had to use the same dialogue. The results being wildly different, but what a challenge, eh.
Recently I wrote about some good bottle shows and that, perhaps is why they're good The constraints of staying on the standing sets.
Last year's foray into play writing was also an exercise in constraints. While an experienced theatre-type sees worlds in just a bare stage, I'm not that experienced theatre-type. I'm used to cutting every couple of pages to a new scene and location, so the challenge - the constraints was not doing that. Using only the space and technical limitations of a stage and real time.
I've never written one of those 48-hour flicks. You know the kind. You turn up at minute one and they give you a genre, maybe an object, or a character, or a line that must appear in the film and then you make it. In 48 hours.
The most obvious constraint is, of course, knowing the beginning and the end. Write what you like, but you got to start with the beginning and get to the end. If you don't have those, stop staring at the blank page.
Ridley Scott's putting out this anthology, Parallel Lines, in which all the filmmakers had to use the same dialogue. The results being wildly different, but what a challenge, eh.
Recently I wrote about some good bottle shows and that, perhaps is why they're good The constraints of staying on the standing sets.
Last year's foray into play writing was also an exercise in constraints. While an experienced theatre-type sees worlds in just a bare stage, I'm not that experienced theatre-type. I'm used to cutting every couple of pages to a new scene and location, so the challenge - the constraints was not doing that. Using only the space and technical limitations of a stage and real time.
I've never written one of those 48-hour flicks. You know the kind. You turn up at minute one and they give you a genre, maybe an object, or a character, or a line that must appear in the film and then you make it. In 48 hours.
The most obvious constraint is, of course, knowing the beginning and the end. Write what you like, but you got to start with the beginning and get to the end. If you don't have those, stop staring at the blank page.