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Marilyn Horowitz

Marilyn Horowitz

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What Is The Character’s Dream?

December 23, 2009 by Marilyn Horowitz

I worked on two screenplays and two novels with private students today. In all four cases, the two biggest challenges for the writers were:

1) The stakes weren’t high enough.

2) The main character was too passive.

To solve these problems, I suggested that they ask themselves the first of The Four Magic Questions of Screenwriting:

What is the character’s dream?

In Up In The Air, the answer might be to get 10 million flyer miles.

In An Education, it might be: To find out what I really want from life.

Now try it for your main character and see what you get.

Good luck and happy writing.

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Thank you. If it hadn’t been for you Marilyn, I don’t think I would have made the Woodstock film which… Read more “Nancy C.”

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