Richard Beynon’s blog

Over the time Michele Rowe and I, Richard Beynon, developed our new Screenwriting Crash Course, we often discussed the questions being raised in the various modules of the course – and debated [...]

I bet you’re a kind and compassionate person. You might not be an animal lover, but you’d never be wantonly cruel to a mutt.  You don’t taunt homeless people as losers. If you were confronted [...]

The screenwriter, Michael Arndt, sat down at 4:27 pm on May 23, 2000, to write a screenplay he’d been toying with for some years. On the first day, he wrote twelve pages. On the second, he wrote [...]

Today I’m going to do a little thieving. The object of my theft is a wonderful blog written twelve years ago by the writer of the screenplay for one of my favourite movies, Little Miss Sunshine. [...]

Why do we read? Well, it all depends on the reader, and, of course, what they’re reading. I doubt that Richard Nixon’s former Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, the still-redoubtable and [...]

I’ve had arguments – some passionate to the point of mutually assured destruction – over this single issue: should you develop your characters and the bones of your story, before you start [...]

We all began the year with a story with a happy ending: that by December we’d have written that long-deferred novel or script… or that short story that’s teased us these last months… or started a [...]

I’m sitting in Campo San Polo in the coolth of the umbrellas of the Bar Cico, surrounded by a sprinkling of patrons. An elderly Italian man wrinkled and weather-worn sporting a fine set of long [...]

Need some instant inspiration to get writing? Who doesn’t. Here are ten of our Monday Motivations, all focusing on story, sure to spur you on. Read them all at once, or one a day, to gain advice, [...]

There was, in Bedford in the UK, a curious institution called the Panacea Society. It was a millenarian religious group, founded in 1919 which followed the teachings of a nineteenth-century seer [...]

It’s a delicate tightrope we walk. On the one hand, if we provide too much information, we run the risk of turning a suspenseful story into a ho-hum record of events. Restraint in feeding your [...]

I’m reading an exceptionally deft and intriguing Nordic thriller written by a distinctly unNordic former inhabitant of the East Midlands, Will Dean. It’s true, though, that he’s since married a [...]