Screenwriting 101 -- Dennis Lehane

START WITH CHARACTERS: “The plot is just the vehicle by which the characters are revealed. You create a bunch of characters and let them start bouncing into one another. That’s how a good story happens.”

KEEP ‘EM MOVING: “My agents has a great line: ‘Alice was down the rabbit hole at the end of page one.’ A story is about movement. If you’ve got more than one page with a character sitting in a room, get him out.”

FORGET THE PAST: “What your characters did before today is irrelevant. Flashbacks tend to be an alarm bell that your story isn’t working. If you want to see a great example of character in action, go rent THE VERDICT with Paul Newman. You know almost nothing about his character’s past.”

MAKE EVERYTHING COUNT: “Every scene needs to have a point. As David Mamet says, ‘A scene ends when a character gets what he wants or doesn’t get what he wants.’ Everything else is extraneous.”

HIDE, DON’T SHOW: “Suspense tends to be best delivered offstage – it’s delivered by withholding information rather than showing it. The specter of what could happen is far more interesting than what actually does happen.”

GET TO THE END: “A professor said to me once, ‘Just finish the damn book.’ If you never complete a draft, you’ll never know how to do it.”

REWRITE, REWRITE, REWRITE: “That first draft is just spaghetti on the wall. I rewrote my first book eight times in two years – that’s where you make yourself a genius.”

-- Dennis Lehane (Mystic River, The Wire)