Go Into The Story Resource: 10 Screenwriting Skills and Traits You Need
Develop your expertise in 10 areas to maximize your screenwriting potential.
On May 16, 2018, Go Into The Story turned 10 years old — you can read the very first blog post here. I led with this paragraph:
Welcome to Go Into The Story! Right now, it’s nothing but a humble, threadbare blog, but I hope it will evolve into an active resource for aspiring screenwriters, as well as a community for anyone interested in storytelling and the creative life.
And evolve it did! To the point where it was recently named “Best of the Best” Scriptwriting Website in the 20th Annual Writer’s Digest Best Websites for Writers list.
To celebrate 10 years of blogging about screenwriting, writing, Hollywood, movies, TV, and the creative life, each day in May, I’m going to feature a piece of Go Into The Story trivia, plus a writing resource you can find in the site’s archives. This is not an exercise in self-congratulations so much as I figured readers could use some tips about how to best use the site. With — to date — 24,140 articles and over 100 archive topics, there is a LOT of content here. Hopefully, these posts for the next 31 days will clue in more recent followers and remind long-time readers about resources you can use to facilitate deepening your understanding of the writing craft.
Today’s trivia: I’m not sure how Medium determines this, but if you read my profile, it says: “Top writer in Movies, Writing, Television, Fiction, Education, Creativity, Business.”
Looking at that, I’d have to say… that pretty much gets it right.
Today’s Go Into The Story resource: 10 Screenwriting Skills and Traits You Need.
During the 10 years I’ve run this blog, I have been privileged to conduct one-on-one interviews with nearly two hundred screenwriters including dozens with Black List and Nicholl Fellowship winning writers. Along the way, it’s been fascinating to learn the variety of approaches to the craft, yet at the same time how certain universal themes recur.
I was struck by five personality traits and five skill sets that keep popping up in my conversations with professional writers, so I thought it would be helpful to do a series, a checklist if you will, of areas we can focus on as we develop as screenwriters.
Five Screenwriting Traits
Five Screenwriting Skills
Obviously there is a lot that goes into honing your craft as a writer, but I think these ten aspects of who we are and what we do are especially important for anyone seeking a career as a Hollywood writer.
Each day this month, I want to take the opportunity to thank you for supporting Go Into The Story. I’d love to hear from you in RESPONSES. When did you start following the blog? What are your favorite features? And as always, if you have any suggestions, feel free to suggest away.
