Billy Wilder’s Tips for Writers
1. The audience is fickle.
2. Grab ’em by the throat and never let ’em go.
3. Develop a clean line of action for your leading character.
4. Know where you’re going.
5. The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.
6. If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.
7. A tip from Lubitsch: Let the audience add up two plus two. They’ll love you forever.
8. In doing voice-overs, be careful not to describe what the audience already sees. Add to what they are seeing.
9. The event that occurs at the second-act curtain triggers the end of the movie.
10. The third act must build, build, build in tempo and action until the last event, and then —
11. — that’s it. Don’t hang around.
Taken from “Conversations with Wilder
“7. A tip from Lubitsch: Let the audience add up two plus two. They’ll love you forever.”
This one must be easy to forget, considering how often movies leave me with the impression that filmakers think their audiences are idiots.
Hey, did you get my e-mail re: Geek Love? If you did, disregard this – I don’t want to bug you into replying!
Desirae – I haven’t checked that email in a while – I’m so sorry! I will go check it – I’m leaving for LA on Friday and I’ve been going crazy the last couple weeks getting ready. Thanks for the push!
I love #7. And #6 was one I came back to again and again in my last edit of my script – the problem-solving stage. It helped SO MUCH.
Oh, writing is easy then! :) I read things like this, and I wonder, why on Earth is it so hard to do these simple things? I’m reminded of a professor I had in college when I was studying music, who would tell me, “The piano is extremely easy to play. Just strike the keys in the right order, and the piano does all the work for you.”
For me, “knowing where I’m going” can be a tough one. I’ll often know where I’m going with a story at the end, and then lose sight of it, because sometimes you don’t need to know your ultimate destination so much as know where you’re going to be in a couple hundred words or a few pages or a chapter or two down the road. I recently had to scuttle four chapters of work because I realized that I’d gone seriously awry, even though I could still get to where I knew I was ultimately going. But it was making that journey suck.
These are great. A BIG help.
Thanks!
Same rules, more or less, apply for writing prose. Good to know. Thanks for sharing.