“Your audience is your adversary. If you don't have one get one - imagine it. Imagine it now. To whom is your story addressed and why? Audience is always a creative act of the imagination. You can't tell your story effectively and leave it out. It must be alive in you, vividly alive. It is in conflict with everything that is false in what you have written. If it is an audience worthy of your talent and potential, it won't let you slide by the lies, the laziness, the shortcuts. If you don't take audience seriously, you can be sure it will return the favor.” WritingFilmQuotesAudienceStoryScreenwritingStoneking Author:Billy Marshall Stoneking
“There are far too many screenwriters who have made themselves honorary “secret” members of the Audience Protection Society (APS). Of course, they’re easy to spot, which makes their membership in this group anything but secret. They write as if they are duty bound to protect their readers from the nastiness of ruthless drama. The way they see it, if they’re going to go to the trouble of creating loveable and attractive characters why throw them to blood-thirsty apes, or have them face a fate worse than death? They tell themselves that such actions would offend their audience’s sensibilities, but really it’s their own fears and prejudices they can’t cope with, not to mention those nagging insecurities concerning their ability to write credible characters in the grip of extreme emotion. They’d rather be dead than write cheese.” QuotesAudienceCharactersScreenwritingStoneking Author:Billy Marshall Stoneking
“The story writes you as much as you write it. And the process of re-writing isn't so much a quest to re-write the story as it is to re-write the writer.” DramaStoryScreenwritingStoneking Author:Billy Marshall Stoneking