Field’s Paradigm allows the organization of stories into structured timelines. Act One: story set up; Act Two: confrontation; Act Three: resolution. In 1979, for the first time in screenwriting history, Syd introduced the Paradigm in Screenplay – The Foundations of Screenwriting.
Structure always exists. Filmmakers, writers, and actors find structure to better tell the story.
Recently, I was invited to speak at the Los Angeles chapter of Sisters in Crime, an international organization of authors, readers, publishers, agents, booksellers and librarians bound by a passion for the mystery genre and championing women who write mysteries.
It’s October. Spider webs, creepy decor, and elaborate costumes are rising from the dead. Halloween, one of my least favorite holidays, looms just beyond the horizon, creeping closer, preparing for a jump scare. When I was a kid, I donned my mask and cape with glee, preparing for a massive candy haul bigger than the previous year. Now I feel like I’m too old to dress up and hunt for candy and all my friends seem to feel the same.
Recently, I had the pleasure of offering two writing workshops at the request of the Missouri Film Office in promotion of their Scriptwriting 101 initiative MOStories – The Missouri Stories Scriptwriting Fellowship. This is an international competition for screenplays and television pilot scripts with story lines set in the state of Missouri.
Going to the Movies is Syd Field’s memoir, tracing his unplanned path to become the authority regarding dramatic structure and visual-storytelling over the course of four decades of well… going to the movies.
Field’s expertise was honed by impassioned conversations with
Recently, I swapped screenplays with a friend of mine. We planned to exchange notes on our early drafts and lend our respective critical eyes to each other’s work. Her script was good: a unique premise, filled with solid laughs and so much heart the Tin Man from Oz would be jealous. But her story wasn’t working. And now I was entrusted with the task of helping her figure out why.
Screenwriters are often people with problems. Midway through the second act, we will write ourselves into a corner. Now the ending doesn’t work. Every character starts to sound exactly the same. Is this opening scene the right place to start my story? As Syd Field points out in The Screenwriter’s Problem Solver, “we often find ourselves lost in the maze of our own creation.”
For many writers, the start of a new year is the time to set deadlines for the next twelve months. You may have hit all the deadlines you charted the previous January, or maybe not. The dawn of a new year has such potential. There’s nothing to be done about the year gone by. Let it go. You either made your deadlines, or you didn’t.
CEO, Founder, L.A. Performing Arts Conservatory, laconservatory.com
Being an actress first, when I began to study screenwriting with Syd Field, one of the major principles that he taught me: Dramatic Need – really struck a chord with me. Below is a discussion of how now, years later, I teach dramatic need to actors, writers, and directors.
To my astonishment, the first three months of 2017 found me in cosmopolitan Singapore. Employed as the Project Director of a professional training program entitled WritersLab, I was there to help evolve the quality of television writing for the local market, and hopefully, make it more competitive across Southeast Asia. It was a ten-week, TV pressure cooker that leveraged pretty much every skill I’ve acquired over thirty-five years in the entertainment industry.
