Tzpilot's Bio

[ScriptNurse]

Yup.

[tzpilot]

Thanks Don,

Good point... Criticism is what you make of it.  One can use it to help improve their writing or they can use it to take offense.  In my opinion, if you can't take a little criticism, you probably shouldn't  be writing anything you might expect the public to see one day.

[ScriptNurse]

Dan,

You get it.

I am amazed at how many people think this is easy and they turn out garbage, usually riddled with incoherent sentences, incorrectly used words and misspellings that would embarrass a fourth grade student ... and how indignant they can become when I tell them their work is crap.

You are correct, the short form is deceptively simple. The problem is that it forces the writer to make every scene, every description and every uttered word count. There's not the luxury of length as in a feature film script.

Over on the main site, do peruse the articles as there's a lot of very good information there.

I welcome you and feel free to make your opinions known ... it's one of the fun aspects of the site.

[tzpilot]

Hi everyone!

I stumbled across this site quite accidentally, but it's great!  I'm glad I found this place.  Here are a few things about me:

My real name is Dan and I am from Indianapolis, IN.  I am 39 years old, married to the same wonderful woman for the past 17 years, and we have 2 boys, ages 7 and 9.  I am an airline pilot by trade.

I have always enjoyed writing, which of course was a great help in college, but I've only recently discovered screenwriting about 2 years ago.  I can't really pinpoint why I decided to try my hand at this, except for the fact that it's not easy.  I always enjoy taking on things that are difficult, as my grandma always said to me, "anything in life that is worthwhile is never easy, you have to go get it".  So here I am... I dove into this with both feet.  I raided amazon.com and read every book I could get my hands on about screenwriting.  Syd Field and Robert McKee are among my favorites.  No matter how many times I read and re-read these books I always learn something...  Aside from reading everything I can get my hands on, I have taken several on-line screenwriting courses from the Gotham Writers Workshop in NYC. 

I mostly enjoy writing in the drama genre, especially focusing on family, adolescence, and coming of age themes.  There is so much material in just these few categories that it makes my head spin, and I often find myself wide awake, lying in bed with ideas just flowing.  It's not until I just get up and write this stuff down before I can usually get myself back to sleep.  (Is this normal??)  I am not really interested in writing "High Concept" ides for Hollywood.... For me, I think most of that stuff is fairly shallow in both character and story.  Ocasionally, a few good ones come out.  Don't get me wrong these writers have talent,  but I haven't been overly impressed.  I much perfer a good Indie film.  Instead, what I find that is really powerful and what I really love to write are character based scripts that you might find in an Indie film.  Not that my work couldn't one day be involved in a Hollywood production...  I'm not going to hold my breath on that one.  But there's nothing more powerful than you or your audience being able to connect with a character that you have either written or are watching on the screen.  For me, that's what it's all about.

To date I have written one full length screenplay that was a product of my last Gotham class.  Currently, I am in the midst of putting together the structure for a movie short to enter in this year's Script Nurse contest.  All I can say is wow.... this short stuff is hard... I was amazed how fast 120 pages can go by when writing a full length script, but bringing it down to 10-20 pages... whew.... sweating here...

I'm sorry to babble on for so long so I'll wrap this up.  I'm glad to have found this site and look forward to learning from everyone as well as contributing what I can, whenever I can.

Great to be here!