Sophia Peaslee: Screenwriter.

This is an easy one. The Lost Room!!!!

Good point, Ciara. I watched the film with great expectations but like you I was highly disappointed. What a shame. But how fun was the TV series!

I'm with Xochi Blymyer I would love to see the end of Colony. We need that 3rd season.

Me too! Nice to 'meet' you.

Thanks so much Frank Van Der Meijden and John Michael German! Congrats Christiane Lange !!

Sophia Peaslee Thank you and best of luck!

Rutger Oosterhoff LOL! I like that! So many possible twists in that story line, too!

I get self-conscious writing young characters also so I try to remember that the sixteen year old character in JUNO did not really sound like a real teenager nor did the high schoolers in SUPERBAD. Adding your own style and rhythm helps.

Coming of age usually involves a search for an identity that confirms with their peers, but the ordeals the characters go through reveal their true identity for them. Sometimes younger characters that are unburdened by life's baggage and years of social conditioning by society can end up talking the most sense in these situations.

Hi Rob, nice to meet you! I'm good, how about yourself?

Adrian-Asia Petty Adrian, it depends on the story you are telling. Mind you happy-ever-after just never cuts it with me, unless you are writing a fairy story.

Craig D Griffiths: Good catch. I actually blanked on mentioning the tragic endings. Shakespeare's dramas didn't really match any of the ones that I mentioned.

I like the No. 4 ending, where there's a swerve surprise at the end, yet the pieces were all there for those with eyes to see. Years ago I recall a movie where the family is all bent out of shape because the father left for another woman. Yet, a year later, they discover he didn't fly off to Europe with the woman. Instead, he fell into a hole on the family property and slowly died over weeks. The family turmoil over what they thought he did, kept them from guessing what might have actually happened. Such movies are good life lessons.

I want to thank you to everyone who gave their suggestions, you all made great points and I greatly appreciate all of them. I think I might have fallen in love with some of the characters and scenes too much, I'm going to take a step back and be brutally honest what moves the story forward and what doesn't. Thank you again.

I find it really helpful to look at each scene and figure out what its purpose is (is it exposition or is it driving the plot forward) and what has changed after the scene has ended. Also just going through tightening up dialogue and description can shave off so many pages before you have to cut any scenes. For example I had a line:

"How are we gonna do this Spence? Easy way or hard way?"

And the second part of that line just repeats the idea from the first part of the line, cutting it to:

"How are we gonna do this Spence?"

And immediately that moment felt stronger and I had lost a whole line's worth of space on the page.

Good luck!

You need to figure out which parts of your story are most important. Good luck.

Love the information being given! Thank you for sharing!

I also work on a mac. I really love the tools offered at onestopforwriters.com for outlining, worldbuilding, and figuring out characters (it's a subscription but it has a two week free trial). For notecarding I like Scrapple (it also costs ~$20 though and it's made by the Scrivener people).

I hadn’t heard of onestopforwriters or Scrapple. I’ll check them out.

Today I downloaded the trial of Scrivener and went through the tutorial. I don’t want to get ahead of myself here, but this app might be better suited to my writing methods than anything I’ve used before!

Aside from the notecards that can expand into outlines, then into full scenes, I love the split screen mode. Usually, I maintain separate docs for all my non-script-format notes and alternate scene drafts. Scrivener lets you keep all that in one doc, then split screen between any segment you want. including pictures!

I’ll try it for the trial period, see if I like it enough to pay $60. One annoyance will be if I like it a lot, I may have to pay twice to get it for my Windows laptop too. (My desktop is Mac.) Still, $120 is cheaper than Final Draft.