Saturday, February 16, 2008

Paul Graham is a venture capitalist in the software industry. He often writes clever, informal essays about how to start companies, design useful software, etc.; and these essays often have good advice for screenwriters. (My degree is in Computer Science, and all that programming has turned out to be useful in writing a well-structured screenplay without a lot of wasted effort.) Here's an essay on what successful new ideas in software seem to have in common. Headline: good new ideas often look wrong.:

I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.

These point all apply to screenwriting, and if you've been reading this blog for a while, you can probably see how they apply. So actually drawing the corrolary moral for screenwriters is left as an exercise; I hope readers will post their solution in the comments.

Labels: blog fu

10:35 AM

2 Comments:

OK. You work on stuff no one else is working on. There's probably a reason for that. Namely, no one cares...

http://janeyruthsscreenplays.blogspot.com/

By  Anonymous, at 3:20 AM  

The corollary that I drew from the essay is: don't go chasing trends and get your work out there. Make a digital short and post it on the web instead of spending years trying to perfect that one script and then get a producer interested, obtain funds, etc.

By  DougJ, at 11:32 PM  

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