June 2009 Archives

This week sees Robert McKee deliver his brilliant Story seminar series in Melbourne before bringing the three day screenwriting-fest to Sydney for what is apparently his last visit to Australia. If you are a screenwriter - amateur or otherwise - you will most likely have come across McKee in your readings. Yet the chance to participate in the fuill three day seminar is a chance not to be missed.

It's here! And now with added arrows! The June edition of the Top Fifty Blogs on Writing in Australia is live and ready for you to enjoy, argue with, marvel at and link to.

There are a few new blogs on the list. Some are very new with only a couple of posts - great to see some fresh bloggers taking a hand so give them encouragement.

• An Englishman, Scotsman and Irishman go into a bar
• Ready, steady, go
• The three act structure
• The popularity of trilogies in fiction

The number three recurs again and again throughout writing. Whether it is in the choice of words to create a pleasing sentence or the wider structure beneath a script, the number three seems inescapable as a stylistic and structural choice.

If you're telling a story, there comes a time when you have to explain to the audience what's going on. Exposition is unavoidable, but if your characters merely start telling the story to each other, the script will feel false. People just don't talk like that.

One technique frequently used to cover exposition and make the scene interesting is to use conflict. Every scene should have some form of conflict, but by placing conflict at the heart of the scene, the exposition can seem a natural resolution instead of a hokey intrusion.