It is a truth universally acknowledged that a story with good bones must be adapted over and over again — Years ago, one of my screenwriter friends worked on an adaptation of Jane Austen’s 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice for Turkish TV. They announced the project to the media as the Turkish remake of the famous novel. It took place in a farmhouse in the south of Turkey. Their Mr…

A story is a metaphor for life, it is not reality — This is not about the legal problems you might run into when you write about real people. Yes, if you want to tell a story based on a real person, whether it is a documentary, drama or fiction, you might have to buy the rights of the story, or obtain…

Why is it so hard to move onto the second act? — I know; when I write solo, I do it too. It’s hard to let go of the safe, familiar waters of the first act and move into the dangerous world of “confrontation.” I think what stops me is fear, but I don’t always realize it that way. It goes like…

It isn’t a mess, it is a story. You can rewrite a story. — We have a saying in Turkish: “If the bald man had the medicine, he would put it on his own head.” When I am about to write advice, a tsunami of negativity hits me. I feel like the bald man trying to market his hair loss treatment. …

Sometimes you can be lazy while working your ass off — We hadn’t slept the night before — my screenwriting group had stayed up all night emailing each other back and forth, working on the final rewrite (well, one of the twenty final versions) of our script. The production was supposed to begin in a few days. …

Approach with caution — I gave bad feedback to a friend’s movie idea. Two years later, I still feel regret. My friend writes poetry and fiction. One day she sent me an e-mail asking “Could this be a movie?” attached with a one-page synopsis for a psychological family drama. I thought that there were…

Never write a romance scene with candlelights — “The Guru of Gurus,” “The Godfather of Story,” “Aristotle of Our Time…” Robert McKee is the most famous screenplay instructor who teaches and inspires movie makers, novelists, poets, all kinds of storytellers around the world. …

You can’t watch the same movie twice — “No man ever steps in the same river twice. For it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” Heraclitus When I watched The Piano (1993) for the first time in Ankara as a young woman, I didn’t know much about storytelling, or life. By the time I…