Trying to be original might be hurting your chance of coming up with great film ideas — If you asked me about the happiest day of my life, I would say the day we sold four projects to a producer in one meeting. Yep! It really happened. But it came after years of drudgery. When we first founded our screenwriting group, we were hired to write scripts…

Sometimes it is rude to say thank you — When my son was a baby, I learned that I could be rude by saying “thank you.” I was rude to my mother on a regular basis. She looked after my son when I went to meetings, and every time I went back to pick him up, I said, “thank…

This is what our producer told us — My screenwriting group and I took pride in writing the most grown-up show on Turkish TV, not one of those silly soap operas of the mid-2000s. It was a political period drama. The first mainstream prime-time TV show in Turkey that bravely criticized the military coup d’etat of 1980. It…

The short answer is no and yes! — When our elderly neighbors found out that I was a screenwriter, they invited me to their house for an afternoon tea. They told me stories about their life. They were high school sweethearts from a small town. Their dads hated each other but they still got married. All of a…

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. It takes a…

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. We hit the send…