There is a very specific, agonizing sensation that every screenwriter knows: your plot is moving, scenes are firing on all cylinders, explosions or dramatic arguments are occurring right on schedule—and yet, the entire draft feels completely hollow. You’ve built a functional roller coaster, but nobody cares who is sitting in the cart. In early drafts,…
Screenwriting is a uniquely brutal craft. A novelist can meander through three pages of internal monologue about the smell of rain, and we call it literature. A screenwriter attempts that, and an assistant at a production company uses their title page as a coffee coaster before tossing the rest into the recycling bin. Screenplays aren’t…
There is a distinct, delicious irony in setting up a containerized Linux server on a cloud droplet, wiring up an enterprise-grade automation engine, and paying an artificial intelligence model fractional pennies per token—all so I can spend less time looking at screens. We are told the internet is broken, that algorithmic feeds have turned our…