According to Aristotle, the first law of storytelling is that plot reigns over all other elements.   Plot needs to be better conceived and executed than production design, more profound psychologically than any actor’s performance, and more shocking than any gory spray of blood across the screen. The second law of storytelling is that characters are rendered relatable to viewers by displaying a fundamental morality, propriety, consistency and truth.  Viewers just won’t meld with main characters that are evil, weird, unknowable... Read more

I got another one last night. A person who heard me give a speech sent me a message asking me to evaluate his life story as a good spine for a movie. We folks in the movie business get this kind of message a lot. As a rule, people have absolutely no idea how big and developed an idea needs to be to become fodder for the entertainment industry to start tossing it around. Below is a two-pager I worked... Read more

Someone forwarded this on to me today. We get these kind of requests through Act One all the time, but this one was so egregiously offensive, I am sharing it for posterity…. Looking for a professional screenwriter to help get a Christian feature project ready to shoot. The project has been in development for over two years and has several drafts and treatments written by one of the producers and another screenwriter. The project has a director and producer attached,... Read more

I don’t have the time or will to do a complete analysis of all the faults in The Mighty Macs. It is yet the latest disappointing movie effort to be produced and financed by committed Christians. It will not make its money back and will not add anything to the journey of the exclusively Christian audience that will be coaxed into theaters to support it. Subjecting it to a serious analysis would make me look like a fool, because it... Read more

Somebody wrote me recently that their project got rejected in Hollywood for improper formatting. The writer was irate that such a small thing would be used to reject his script. Here, for the general edification was my response…. I wanted to express a brief defense on behalf of those of us who are sticklers about screenwriting grammar, aka formatting. Considered under a professional lens, formatting is not irrelevant. In the vast majority of projects, a correctly formatted page equals one... Read more

I am giving a two day workshop on the use of visual imagery in storytelling in Colorado in February 2012. They asked me to write a short piece about the topic for their magazine. I wrote too much and they will probably lose half of it. For posterity’s sake, here’s the whole thing. A Good Visual Image is Worth a Thousand Words By Barbara Nicolosi “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found... Read more

Here is a new piece I wrote for my friends at Crisis Magazine about the coming battle for euthanasia. Please click on the link, and send it on to other friends. This issue is critically important, and, as always, our side is staring off into the sunset missing the massing of the opposition. “The evidence is undeniable: Somewhere in the middle of the Terri Schiavo tragedy, Hollywood and the cultural left climbed aboard the latest human-killing bandwagon and have since... Read more

Here’s a snippet from an interview I just did with a Christian magazine called Aletheia. It will be coming out later in the summer. Q: Where would you say our culture stands in regards to good storytellers and stories? BN: My opinion is that we have nearly lost the ability to tell a good story. Part of this is the loss we are seeing in all the art forms, which I think has something to do with the loss of... Read more

[NOTE FROM BARB: Here is the outline for a talk I gave this weekend at the San Diego Christian Writers Guild Conference. Several people asked me for the notes, so I told them I’d post them.] Who Is Your Audience? Writing What Your Soul Knows for the San Diego Christian Writers Conference September 25, 2010   II. This talk will have three parts. A) Part One will talk about the question of what it means to write what you know.... Read more

[Note from Barb: This is something I wrote in the weeks following 9/11. It seems appropriate to repost it now amidst the background of the 9/11 Mosque debate. I think it would have seemed insane to me then, that we are having this debate now. And I would have been right.] “No One Here Is Working Today” Annoyance: “This better not be a wrong number.” Negotiation: “Better a wrong number than bad news.” And finally amazement: So many thoughts can... Read more