| Acknowledgments | p. xii |
| Introduction | p. xiii |
| Storytelling | |
| Idea | |
| You have not written something you care about! | p. 4 |
| Your idea isn't vibrating with originality! | p. 7 |
| You picked the wrong genre! | p. 11 |
| Your story is only interesting to you! | p. 12 |
| Your story is about miserable people who are miserable the whole time and end miserably! Or worse!! | p. 14 |
| You haven't spent enough time thinking up a fantastic title! | p. 15 |
| Character | |
| You picked the wrong main character! | p. 18 |
| You haven't constructed your main character correctly! | p. 21 |
| You are not specific about EVERYTHING when you create a character! | p. 26 |
| You haven't made "place" a character in your story! | p. 27 |
| We have no rooting interest in your hero! | p. 29 |
| Your opponent is not a human being! | p. 31 |
| Your Bad Guy isn't great! | p. 32 |
| The opponent is not the hero's agent of change! | p. 34 |
| The Bad Guy doesn't feel he's the hero of his own movie! | p. 35 |
| You don't give your bad guy a Bad Guy Speech! | p. 36 |
| Your characters do stupid things to move the story forward, a.k.a. they do stuff because you make them! | p. 38 |
| Your minor characters don't have character! | p. 41 |
| Structure | |
| You worried about structure when you came up with your story! | p. 43 |
| You don't have enough tension! | p. 44 |
| You have no time pressure! | p. 47 |
| You don't give the reader enough emotion! | p. 48 |
| You bungled your story structure! | p. 51 |
| You have not done, and then redone, and REDONE, a one-line outline! | p. 63 |
| You have not done a "random thoughts" outline! | p. 65 |
| You have not used the Kerith Harding Rule of Drama! | p. 70 |
| Your B story does not affect your A story! | p. 72 |
| You don't use Set Up and Pay Off to your advantage! | p. 73 |
| You haven't buried exposition like Jimmy Hoffa! | p. 76 |
| You don't withhold surprises until as late as possible! | p. 78 |
| Scenes | |
| You haven't pounded each scene enough! | p. 80 |
| Your scenes don't turn the action! | p. 85 |
| You don't have enough reversals! | p. 89 |
| You have not shouted at each scene, "How can I jack up the conflict?!" | p. 91 |
| You have not used the incredible power of rhyming scenes to your advantage! | p. 93 |
| You haven't cut the first and last lines from as many scenes as possible! | p. 94 |
| Your character does research when she could be talking to somebody! | p. 102 |
| Your characters talk on the phone too much! | p. 103 |
| You have not made every scene memorable! | p. 104 |
| Dialogue | |
| You don't keep a log of overheard dialogue! | p. 106 |
| You haven't separated the characters' voices! | p. 107 |
| You haven't worked your dialogue hard enough! | p. 111 |
| You didn't A-B the dialogue! | p. 114 |
| You have Q & A dialogue! | p. 115 |
| You have characters speaking text but not subtext! | p. 117 |
| You did too much research! | p. 119 |
| You didn't do enough research! | p. 120 |
| Physical Writing | |
| Welcome to Writing | |
| You aren't educated in your chosen storytelling medium! | p. 128 |
| You're using the wrong writing instrument! | p. 130 |
| Your prose is not CRYSTAL CLEAR! | p. 132 |
| Format | |
| You don't understand screenplay format! | p. 138 |
| You have naked sluglines or no sluglines at all! | p. 154 |
| You over-direct your actors! | p. 157 |
| You use parentheticals wrong! | p. 158 |
| Characters | |
| You change character names on us! | p. 162 |
| Too many of your characters have names! | p. 163 |
| Character names begin with the same letter! or WORSE, they RHYME! | p. 164 |
| You do not describe main characters with a concise, telling, two (or so) sentence character description! | p. 168 |
| Scene Description | |
| You use novelistic language! | p. 171 |
| You poisoned your scene description with "to be"! | p. 173 |
| You haven't cut as many "thes" and "thats" as possible! | p. 175 |
| You don't put the most important word at the end of the sentence! | p. 177 |
| You describe dialogue in scene description! | p. 179 |
| You have not paid attention to image order in scene description! | p. 180 |
| You haven't cut scene description to the bone! | p. 185 |
| Rewriting | |
| Don't repeat! Anything! Ever! | p. 195 |
| You rewrite while you write! | p. 199 |
| You do a rewrite by reading the whole script at once! | p. 200 |
| You don't have a killer first page! | p. 202 |
| You blew your first ten pages! ARGGGGGHHHH! | p. 210 |
| You haven't ripped out the first twenty pages! | p. 216 |
| You haven't cut every bit of extraneous action! | p. 217 |
| You think your first (or ninth) draft is perfect! | p. 223 |
| Picky, Picky, Picky | |
| You don't know the meaning of every word in your script! | p. 227 |
| You use numbers instead of words! | p. 229 |
| You call shots! | p. 230 |
| You call specific songs! | p. 231 |
| You didn't run your spellcheck, you moron! | p. 232 |
| You trust your spellcheck! Ah haa ha haaa ha ha! | p. 236 |
| You think longer is better! | p. 237 |
| You didn't read your script out loud! | p. 238 |
| You used a crummy printer! | p. 239 |
| What Now? | |
| Don't Be a Jackass, Be Professional | |
| You want to be famous more than you want to write! | p. 244 |
| You think your script is special and rules don't apply! | p. 246 |
| You put the wrong stuff on your title page! | p. 247 |
| You haven't done a table read! | p. 251 |
| You're dying to send the script out before you're really, really ready! | p. 252 |
| The Industry | |
| You haven't the first clue how the business works! | p. 255 |
| You don't know what time they eat lunch in Hollywood! | p. 258 |
| Your sense of entitlement is in overdrive! a.k.a. "Don't fight the notes!" | p. 260 |
| You don't know what a decent query letter is! | p. 262 |
| You made boneheaded demands in your query letter! | p. 267 |
| You don't want to sign their release! | p. 268 |
| Angst-O-Rama | |
| You think Hollywood will steal your idea! | p. 270 |
| You don't understand Hanlon's Razor! | p. 272 |
| You don't know the difference between Natalie Merchant and Patti Smith! | p. 273 |
| You don't know you can write your way out of a hole! | p. 274 |
| You don't know how to get an agent! | p. 276 |
| You get excited when they say they like it! | p. 279 |
| You're confusing hope with denial! | p. 280 |
| Fading Out | p. 282 |
| About the Author | p. 287 |
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