Action Description Quotes

I can’t help thinking about memoir as a down-and-up process: Dive down for color; come up for context. Sink back down for action; climb back up for self-awareness and gratitude.

I enjoy the mental gymnastics that go along with matching voice to picture and vice versa and trying to accent the action as opposed to provide all of the action through my words. And that's really what play-by-play is.

Remember, you are expressing the techniques and not doing the techniques.

A lot of writing is a form of seeing - putting down what you see in terms of action and landscape.

Never use the words 'suddenly' or 'all hell broke loose.'

Something that you should take particular notice of is the fact that the best scripts have very few explanatory passages. Adding explanation to the descriptive passages of a screenplay is the most dangerous trap you can fall into. It’s easy to explain the psychological state of a character at a particular moment, but it’s very difficult to describe it through the delicate nuances of action and dialogue. Yet it is not impossible.

I find screenplays easy to write, my novels being very visual. You see what people look like. The physical action is described.

Describe character using dialogue. Describe character using what the characters see or do or think, but not what they had done or where they had been.

Screenplay is the toughest form of writing for me, because you need to be in present tense. You need to be describing things as they occur.