Vered Neta's Blog

Let me paint you a picture.

You’ve spent months, possibly years, writing something you genuinely believe in. You’ve revised it until your eyes bleed. You’ve workshopped the query letter seventeen times. You hit send with a mixture of hope, nausea, and the specific kind of madness that makes writers… writers.

And then… nothing. Or worse: a very polite email telling you that while your work shows real promise, it’s not quite right for them at this time, and they wish you every success with your writing.

Every success with your writing. As if they didn’t just quietly close a door in your face.

Welcome to querying. Pull up a chair. There’s wine.

Here’s a number I’ll offer you from personal experience: 150.

That’s how many submissions, to agents, to publishers, to literary magazines, I’ve racked up over nearly
a decade of writing. Some came back with a kind word. Many came back with a form rejection so
generic it could have been addressed to literally anyone. And a significant portion never came back at all.
The digital equivalent of a door quietly closing while you’re still mid-knock.

Nobody tells you, when you first sit down to write your book or your script, that querying is essentially a second career, one that requires a completely different skillset from writing, runs on a completely different timeline, and has an emotional texture closer to waiting for medical results than anything that should reasonably be called a creative pursuit.

And if you write scripts? Oh, the querying journey for screenwriters makes novel submissions look like a weekend stroll. The gatekeepers are different, the formats are different, the feedback (when you get any) is different, and the silence between stages can stretch so long you genuinely forget what you submitted or why.

So yes. The emotional side is real. It is relentless. And it does not improve as much with experience as people suggest it will.

But here’s the thing nobody puts on a motivational poster: it doesn’t finish you either.

A few weeks ago, I received an email.

Not a form rejection. Not a silence. An actual email from a publisher expressing interest in offering me a contract for my cosy crime novel, Crime Cleaners.

I want to be clear: this is not the end of the road. There’s a long journey still ahead before a publishing house puts that book into the world. But after nearly ten years and more rejections than I care to count, it was a landmark. A genuine, full-stop, pour-yourself-something-good landmark.

I’m not telling you this to do a victory lap. I’m telling you because the reason that email exists is not talent alone, or luck alone, or even the quality of the book alone (though I do think Crime Cleaners is rather good,
but then I would, wouldn’t I).

That email exists because I kept going. Strategically, stubbornly, and with a mindset that had to be consciously rebuilt more than once.

#1 – Treat It Like a Long Run From Day One – Not a Sprint.

The biggest mistake writers make is querying in bursts of hope followed by long retreats of despair.

You submit ten agents, get rejected by eight and ignored by two, and take six months off to lick your wounds. Meanwhile, the right agent is sitting there, having never heard from you.

Querying is not a sprint with recoveries.
It’s a slow, steady river. The mindset shift is this: submission is part of the writing life, not a break from it.

Schedule it like you schedule drafting. Keep a spreadsheet (I cannot stress the spreadsheet enough; it is the single most sanity-preserving tool in the querying writer’s arsenal). Treat each batch as research, not a referendum on your worth.

#2 – Rejection is Data, Not a Verdict.

This one takes time to actually believe rather than just recite. But it’s true.

A rejection from an agent or publisher tells you almost nothing about the quality of your work. It tells you about fit, timing, their current list, what they had for breakfast, and the specific alchemy of a stranger’s taste on a Tuesday afternoon. That’s all.

What rejection can tell you, if you collect enough of it and look at it honestly: are there patterns? Are you getting requests for partials that then go cold? That’s a first-chapter issue, probably. Are you not getting responses at all? That might be a query letter issue, not a manuscript issue. Use the data. Don’t let it use you.

#3 – Separate Your Identity From Your Submission.

Your manuscript is not you. Your script is not you. They are things you made, and things you made can be adjusted, rewritten, reframed, and resubmitted.

Whatever comes back, or doesn’t, it’s the work that went out into the world, not you.

This sounds obvious. It is extraordinarily difficult in practice. Writers, novelists and screenwriters alike tend to pour themselves into their work in a way that makes this separation feel dishonest.

But the mindset shift is non-negotiable.
The moment you conflate a “no” on your submission with a “no” on your worth as a writer or a human being, you’ve handed the process power it was never meant to have.

#4 – Build A Life Around The Writing, Not Around The Waiting.

The querying black hole is worst when writing itself has stopped. If all your creative energy is sitting in someone else’s inbox, every day without a response is a day your whole identity is on hold.

The strategic answer is almost offensively simple: keep writing. Start the next thing.

Genuinely. Not as a distraction tactic, but as a commitment to the idea that you are a writer regardless of what any given agent or publisher decides. The waiting becomes background noise when something new demands your attention. 

I submitted Crime Cleaners in December 2025 and, rather than spend my days refreshing my inbox like a woman possessed, I started planning a romance novel, The Widow and the Kabbalist, which I am now happily in the middle of writing. And published my short stories anthology “Not Done Yet.”

The submission nerves are still there. They’re just no longer the loudest thing in the room.

For screenwriters especially, this matters enormously. The pipeline between pitch and production is so long and so uncertain that writers who stop creating while they wait tend to disappear. The ones who don’t disappear are the ones with three new things ready by the time a door finally opens.

#5 – Celebrate The Small Forward Movements.

Here’s the thing about landmark moments: they only feel like landmarks in retrospect. While you’re on the journey, they’re just the next step.

And if you’re only celebrating the big wins, the contract, the agent, the commission, you’re going to spend most of your writing life feeling like you haven’t achieved anything.

Celebrate the polite personal rejection over the form rejection. Celebrate the request for a full manuscript. Celebrate finishing the query letter. Celebrate the submission itself, because submitting takes courage that many writers never summon.

This is exactly why in my Facebook group, Into the Script, we have a weekly segment called
Monday Mini-Win, a dedicated space where writers share whatever moved the needle that week,
big or small, and get genuine cheers from a community of people who understand exactly what it cost.
If you’re not already in the group, come find us. A win shared is a win that sticks.

The emotional sustainability of a long querying journey depends entirely on your ability to find meaning and momentum in the small things. The big things are real. But they’re rare. You cannot live on rare.

Nearly ten years. More than 150 submissions. More silence than I care to remember.

And then one Tuesday, an email.

I don’t know where you are in your querying journey. Maybe you’re just starting out, still optimistic, query letter freshly polished. Maybe you’re somewhere in the middle, a little bruised, wondering whether the silence means something. Maybe you’re further along than you’d like to admit, quietly deciding whether it’s worth continuing.

I can’t promise you a contract. I can’t guarantee an agent, a commission, or any specific outcome. The industry doesn’t work like that, and anyone who tells you it does is selling something.

What I can tell you is this: the writers who get there aren’t always the most talented. They’re the ones who built a mindset sturdy enough to outlast the wait.

Yours can be that sturdy. I’m fairly confident of that. Now go update your spreadsheet.

Now it’s YOUR turn – Where are you on the journey right now: hopeful, battle-scarred, or somewhere in the messy middle?

Would love to get your input in the comment box below.

The post 150 Rejections and One Yes: The Truth About Querying. appeared first on Vered Neta.

I have a confession to make.

After two novels, a cosy crime series, scripts, a nonfiction bestseller, and somewhere north of thirty years thinking seriously about storytelling, I am, for the first time in my life, writing a romance novel.

I know. I know.

The woman who has spent decades raising an eyebrow at airport-running heroes and men who express their feelings exclusively through rain-soaked declarations is now voluntarily writing love. On purpose. With intent.

Here’s the thing. I didn’t avoid romance because I don’t believe in love. I avoided it because I believe in it too differently. “Falling in love” is, quite literally, a fall; it’s in the name. You surrender control, hand your emotional well-being to someone else, and then you’re surprised when you hit the ground. 

I don’t fall in love. I choose to love. Deliberately, with both eyes open and my power firmly in my own hands. And that’s before we get into the fact that love, romance, and physical desire are three entirely separate conversations that popular fiction keeps cramming into one.

So why write romance now? Precisely because of that gap. The thing you’re most resistant to is usually the thing most worth doing.

What I’ve discovered is that you can write romance without cringing your way through every chapter, without a single flash mob, public serenade, or hero who mistakes grand gestures for emotional availability. 

Fair warning: everything that follows is filtered through those lenses. If you love the airport run, if instalove makes your heart sing, if grand gestures are exactly your thing, you’re in excellent company, and none of this is aimed at you. This is just what I’ve learned about writing romance in a way that feels true to me.

#1 – Stop Writing “Falling” – Write Choosing.

The trope that loses me fastest: the protagonist who can’t eat, can’t sleep, can’t think, consumed entirely by the feeling. The narrative presents this as proof that the love is profound.

What it actually describes is a loss of agency, and we’re meant to find it romantic.

The most compelling romantic relationships are built on characters who choose each other, actively, repeatedly, even when it’s inconvenient. That’s where real tension lives. Not in the helpless tumble, but in the moment a person looks at everything they know and decides: yes. This. You.

Matthew and Diana in A Discovery of Witches do this well. Yes, it’s romantasy: ancient vampires, fate of the world, the works. But Diana never stops being herself. She doesn’t fall helplessly into Matthew’s orbit; she walks toward him while continuing to walk toward herself. The story doesn’t ask you to believe the love is real because she lost control. It asks you to believe it because she keeps choosing it with full knowledge of the cost. That’s the difference.

Craft note: Give your characters a moment where they could walk away, and they don’t, not because they’re powerless, but because they’re certain. That moment is worth more than any amount of helpless swooning.

#2 – Love, Romance, and Desire Are Not the Same Story.

Romance fiction bundles three distinct human experiences into one package and ties them with a bow: the emotional bond (love), the heightened courtship rituals (romance), and physical desire. These can absolutely coexist.

But they are not the same, they don’t always arrive together, and pretending they do produces characters who feel less like people and more like wish-fulfilment delivery systems.

Normal People by Sally Rooney pulls these threads deliberately apart. Connell and Marianne have a desire. They have romance in flashes. They have something that might be love, deep and persistent, running underneath everything. 

But Rooney is disciplined enough not to collapse the three. The tragedy is precisely that they don’t line up, that love can exist alongside emotional unavailability, that desire can ignite without real intimacy. The result is a love story readers recognise as uncomfortably true.

Craft note: know which of the three your characters are experiencing in any given scene.
Name it for yourself, even if you never name it on the page. The specificity will show.

#3 – The Grand Gesture Is Almost Always a Red Flag.

The airport run. The public serenade. The skywriting. Let me translate these honestly:
I am going to express my feelings in the most spectacular way I can imagine, and your job is to receive it graciously.

The recipient’s preferences are essentially irrelevant. The flowers arrive at the office whether she wants them there or not.

Crazy Rich Asians understands this perfectly. The whole film is architecturally grand, but the moment that actually earns its romance is the mahjong scene. Rachel, who could have walked away entirely, sits down across from Eleanor and plays quietly, devastatingly, without a word of grandstanding. 

She demonstrates that she understands what’s at stake and has chosen her position with complete clarity.
It’s intimate, controlled, and utterly confident. The grand gesture comes after and lands precisely because
the real work was done in private first.

Craft note: Let your characters express love through attention, not performance. Through the things they noticed and remembered. The reader will feel it more than any skywriting.

#4 – Stop Blaming the Plot. Blame the Person.

The overheard conversation taken out of context. The secret that could be cleared up in one honest sentence, but wasn’t. The well-meaning friend who meddles at exactly the wrong moment.

These devices exist because romance needs obstacles, but most of them work by making characters temporarily stupid, and good readers notice. They feel the authorial hand. They stop believing.

Build conflict into who your characters actually are. Make their wounds and self-protective patterns the thing that threatens the relationship. Then the reader is invested in something real, not in whether a misunderstanding gets cleared up, but in whether a person can change enough to let love in.

Past Lives contains almost no conventional plot. No villain, no manufactured drama. Two people, a set of circumstances, and a series of choices made based on who they actually are. The conflict is the gap between the lives they chose and the life they might have chosen together, created entirely by character, not contrivance. It’s devastating, honest, and not a single frame of it is cringe-worthy.

Craft note: When you’re tempted to reach for a plot device, ask instead: how would a person with this specific damage, at this stage of their growth, sabotage this relationship? Use that.

#5 – Know What Ending Your Story Actually Needs.

The romance genre has its founding covenant: the Happy Ever After (HEA). There’s nothing wrong with it; a love story that ends with love is entirely coherent, and when characters have genuinely earned it, the HEA is honest and satisfying. 

The problem is that it’s delivered by default, regardless of whether the people on the page have actually done the work.

Readers feel that. They close the book with a faint sense of having been cheated, even if they can’t say why.

What’s interesting is that the genre itself has been quietly expanding. The Happy For Now (HFN) ending, where the couple is genuinely together, but the future is left open, has become increasingly accepted and often more honest. 

And then there’s the Anti-RomCom wave: stories that deliberately subvert the conventions, that ask what happens when the grand gesture doesn’t fix everything, when getting the person doesn’t solve the problem. Books like Conversations with Friends sit in this space, using romance’s grammar to say something more uncomfortable about love, power, and what women are actually asked to accept in its name.

None of this means you have to write a dark ending. It means you have to write the right ending, the one that follows from your characters and your story’s truth, not from genre obligation. 

One Day earns its emotional weight precisely because the whole architecture insists on the passage of time and the cost of choices. Whatever ending comes, it doesn’t feel arbitrary. It feels inevitable.

Craft note:  Ask not “do they end up together?” but “have they become people who can?” If yes, let them. The reader will feel the difference

Romance without cringe is not romance without passion. It’s romance written by someone who takes love seriously enough to be honest about it.

It’s love as a choice, not a fall. Conflict that comes from character rather than convenience.
Desire is written with specificity. Endings that are earned rather than assumed.

And it turns out, perhaps inevitably, that the most useful thing I could bring to writing romance for
the first time was exactly the thing that kept me away from it for so long: the conviction that love
is something you do, consciously and deliberately, with both eyes open.

PS – I’ll let you know how my romance novel turns out.

Now it’s YOUR turn – HEA, HFN, or Anti-RomCom – which ending do you actually trust?

Would love to get your input in the comment box below.

The post I Don’t Believe in Falling in Love — So I Wrote a Romance Novel. appeared first on Vered Neta.

A label meant to celebrate women writers has quietly become a way to swallow them whole.
I know, I fell into the trap myself.

When I finished writing my first novel, “Things We Do For Love”, I felt the particular euphoria that every
debut author knows, the “I actually did it” glow that lasts about four days before the panic sets in. 

Then came the KDP publishing setup. Categories. Keywords. The dreaded “where does this book actually live?” moment. Like thousands of writers before me, I looked at my story, messy, emotional, full of family dynamics, love, and loss, and clicked on “Women’s Literature.” It seemed logical. It felt safe. 

It was a catastrophic mistake. 

Within days, my book had been absorbed into an ocean of hundreds of thousands of other titles, all sheltering under that same enormous umbrella. I was invisible. A single raindrop in the Atlantic. 

The moment I changed my categories to “Family Drama,” “Motherhood,” and “Alzheimer’s,” I shot to the top of the charts. The same book. The same words. A different label, and suddenly, the right readers could actually find me. That experience taught me something I’ve been thinking about ever since: the category “Women’s Fiction” doesn’t just fail readers. It actively harms writers.

So let’s talk about why this label, well-meaning as it sounds, is one of the clumsiest, most reductive things to happen to storytelling since someone decided airport bookshops only needed three genres.

#1 – It’s So Wide It Means Absolutely Nothing.

Think about what actually gets filed under “Women’s Fiction”. Gillian Flynn’s ice-cold psychological thrillers. Jojo Moyes’s tear-soaked love stories. Celeste Ng’s quietly devastating family dramas. Zadie Smith’s dazzlingly intellectual social novels. 

These books have almost nothing in common except that they were written by women and feature women prominently. That’s not a genre. That’s just… half of humanity, writing about life.

Take Gone Girl and Me Before You; they were published in the same year and regularly appear on the same Women’s Fiction lists. One is a razor-sharp thriller about a marriage turned psychological warfare.
The other is a romance about assisted dying. Shelving them together is like grouping Breaking Bad and
The Great British Bake Off under “TV shows people like.”

Grouping them together tells the reader nothing. And that’s the problem. Because when a category tells the reader nothing, the reader doesn’t click. And when the reader doesn’t click, the author disappears.

#2 – It Signals To Male Readers (And Prize Panels): “This Isn’t For You”.

Nobody calls The Kite Runner “Men’s Fiction.” Nobody labels Colm Tóibín’s tender novels about family grief as belonging to a gendered genre.

Books by men are just called books, literary fiction, contemporary fiction, or fiction.
The “Women’s” prefix turns a novel into a special-interest text, and in doing so, quietly gives permission to half the population to look away.

Think of Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, which is a ferociously intelligent examination of motherhood, violence, and culpability. It’s been described as Women’s Fiction in dozens of reading guides. 

Meanwhile, books by men tackling parenthood and violence, like Cormac McCarthy and Ian McEwan, are simply Literature. Same themes. Different invitation to the reader. And for the writer, that difference translates directly into reach. Half the audience quietly steps away before the book even has a chance.

#3 – It Quietly Says That Feelings And Relationships Are “Lesser” Subjects.

The unspoken logic is maddening once you notice it: war, power, and existential dread are universal.

Love, family, and emotional complexity are niche, specifically, women’s niche.

Generations of literary gatekeepers decided that the interior life was a smaller subject than the exterior one, and Women’s Fiction became the bin where all that “soft” material got sorted.

Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, four books about female friendship, ambition, class, and identity in
post-war Naples, were initially marketed as Women’s Fiction in many markets. They are now widely considered among the most important novels of the 21st century. Nothing changed except who was paying attention.

The books didn’t change. The perception did. And perception matters. Because when a book is framed as “small,” it is reviewed differently, marketed differently, and often taken less seriously.

For the author, that means fewer reviews, fewer prizes, less critical attention, before a single page has even been read.

#4 – On KDP and Amazon, it’s A Visibility Black Hole.

This is where theory meets brutal commercial reality. Amazon’s “Women’s Fiction” category contains, at any given moment, somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 books.

Unless you have a massive marketing budget or a tidal wave of launch-day reviews, you simply disappear. 

The category is so crowded that it functions more like a landfill than a shelf. Specific subcategories: Domestic Suspense, Family Saga, Coming-of-Age, Grief & Loss, are where actual discoverability happens, because that’s where readers are actually searching.

A reader who loved Behind Closed Doors is not looking for the same experience as someone who loved The Lovely Bones. “Women’s Fiction” collapses those differences. And when everything is blurred together, nothing stands out. Including your book.

#5 – It Makes Women Writers Responsible For Representing All Women.

The label brings a peculiar burden: when your book is “Women’s Fiction,” you are somehow expected to speak for women, to be relatable, accessible, validating for women as a group. 

Male authors are never asked to represent all men. They’re just asked to be good writers.

Women writers deserve exactly the same freedom, to be specific, to be difficult, to be wrong, to be great, without being cast as spokespeople for their gender.

Take Americanah. A specific, nuanced story about identity and belonging. Yet it is often grouped in ways that flatten it into something more general.

Meanwhile, Kazuo Ishiguro is never expected to represent all Japanese men. He is simply allowed to be specific. And specificity is where great writing lives.

When authors are subtly pushed toward “representing,” they often dilute their voice, smooth their edges, and make their stories safer. And in doing so, they lose the very thing that would have made the book powerful.

#6 – It Erases The Actual Genre, Which Is
The Thing Readers Care About.

Here’s the practical catastrophe: genre is how readers find their next book.

Not abstractly, but instinctively. Readers don’t think, I want something written by a woman. They think, I want pace, or I want to cry, or I want a very specific emotional hit.

A reader who loved Big Little Lies wants sharp social drama and dark humour. A reader drawn to Hamnet expects something lyrical and slow, steeped in grief.

These are completely different experiences, yet both get labelled “Women’s Fiction.”

To a reader, that label is useless. So they scroll past. Not because the book isn’t right for them, but because they can’t tell that it is. And when a book loses its genre, it loses its audience.

#7 – The Good News? Readers Have Already Moved On

BookTok, Bookstagram, Goodreads shelves, indie bookshop recommendation cards, none of these are organised by “Women’s Fiction.”

They organise by vibe. By emotional experience. By “books that destroyed me in a good way”, “read in one sitting” and “you will ugly-cry at page 200.”

Readers have always been ahead of the publishing industry on this, and the industry is slowly, reluctantly catching up.

Take It Ends with Us. It didn’t succeed because it sat neatly in a category. It succeeded because readers described the emotional experience to each other. Which is wonderful for readers.

But revealing for writers. Because it means the traditional label, the one you carefully chose on KDP, might be doing far less work than you think. Or worse, the wrong kind of work.

The “Women’s Fiction” label was never really about celebrating women writers.
It was about containing them, giving them a corner of the room and calling it a home. 

My novel found its readers when I stopped letting a vague umbrella category speak for it, and started telling people exactly what it was about: a family fracturing, a mother disappearing into Alzheimer’s, the impossible love in between. That’s not Women’s Fiction. That’s just a story. And stories, when we let them, belong to everyone.

Now it’s YOUR turn – How did you label your latest novel?

Would love to get your input in the comment box below.

The post Why “Women’s Fiction” Hurts Authors. appeared first on Vered Neta.

Let me tell you something embarrassing.

When I first decided to write screenplays, my logic was completely, spectacularly wrong. I thought: a screenplay is only 90 pages. A novel is 300. Clearly, screenwriting is the easier option. I’m heavily dyslexic with an ADHD brain that bounces off walls, and the idea of writing a 300-page novel felt like being asked to climb Everest in flip-flops. Ninety pages? I could do ninety pages. That’s practically a pamphlet.

What I discovered, the hard way, over many drafts and many humbling rewrites, is that screenwriting is brutally harder than novel writing. Every single word earns its place or gets cut. You can’t hide in beautiful prose. You can’t do three paragraphs of internal monologue. You have roughly one minute per page, and if nothing is happening on that page, you’ve just lost your audience, your producer, and possibly your will to live.

My scripts are still being pitched. But here’s the unexpected gift that came from all that screenplay boot camp: when those scripts didn’t sell, I turned them into novels, and they were good. The structure was already there, the pacing was already baked in, and I knew exactly where every scene needed to go. 

Now, whenever I start a new novel (like I’m doing right now), I write the screenplay first.
Every time. It’s my foundation, my blueprint, my sanity.

So this isn’t a theoretical post about craft. This is me telling you what I actually learned,  the hard way, about what writing screenplays teaches you that will make your novels dramatically better.

#1 – Scenes Have an Expiry Date – And Most Novelists Don’t Know It.

Here’s the golden rule drilled into every screenwriter from day one: enter late, exit early. You arrive at a scene at the absolute last possible second before the point of it, and you leave the moment that point lands.

Not after the characters have a little chat about what just happened. Not after someone makes a cup of tea to process their feelings. The moment the scene does its job, you’re gone.

Novelists love to warm up the room. They describe the setting, the light through the window, the character sitting down, getting comfortable, thinking about sitting down. And then after the big emotional moment lands? They linger. They tidy up. They make sure the reader understands.

Screenplay writing cures you of this habit fast, because scripts that do it get coverage notes that say things like “pacing issues in Act Two”, and you die a little inside.

A great recent example: Parasite. Every scene in Bong Joon-ho’s film enters at the point of maximum interest and exits before it overstays its welcome. Watch the sequence where the Parks leave for their camping trip. We’re in, the plan pivots, we’re out. No exhaling, no underlining. The scene is over when its work is done.

Novelists who learn this stop writing scene endings and start writing scene exits. There’s a difference, and it changes everything.

#2 – White Space Is a Tempo Marking, Not an Accident.

A screenplay page equals roughly one minute of screen time. That’s not a guideline, it’s a physical law of the format. And it makes screenwriters hyper-aware that the page’s layout controls how the experience feels.

Short action lines. Frequent breaks. Punchy paragraphs. These aren’t aesthetic preferences; they’re tempo markings, like a musical score telling you to speed up or slow down.

Novelists, especially ones who’ve been told that long, complex sentences signal literary seriousness, can end up with pages that are visually dense and psychologically exhausting. Your reader’s nervous system is responding to the page’s appearance before their brain has processed a single word.
A wall of text says: ” Settle in, this will take a while. A short, sharp paragraph says: move.

Look at how Promising Young Woman works on screen, Emerald Fennell’s screenplay is structured in tight, compressed scenes that keep shifting register from comedy to dread without warning. No scene lingers.
The script’s visual pacing became the film’s emotional pacing. 

When I started applying this to my prose, shorter paragraphs, more white space, trusting the reader to follow, my chapters started feeling faster without a single plot point changing

#3 – Characters DO Things. They Don’t Just Think About Things.

This is the one that novelists resist the most, because interior life is prose’s great superpower. You can live inside a character’s head in ways that film simply can’t access. And that’s genuinely wonderful! Use it!

But here’s the trap: novelists sometimes use interiority as a substitute for action rather than a companion to it. Three pages of a character processing their feelings is not a scene. It’s a therapy session with no other characters.

Screenwriters physically cannot write “she wondered if she’d made a mistake.” The camera can’t film “wondering”. So instead you write: she picks up her phone, puts it down, picks it up again, puts it face down on the table. 

That’s behaviour under pressure. That’s deciding. And what it reveals about the character is more precise
and more interesting than any amount of internal narration.

The Banshees of Inisherin is a masterclass in this. Martin McDonagh shows us Colm’s decision to end the friendship almost entirely through physical behaviour, a turned back, a chair pulled away from a table, a hand placed flat on a bar. We understand everything before a word is spoken. 

Writing screenplays teaches you to do this: to find the physical action that expresses the interior state, and trust it to land. Your novel’s internal monologue becomes sharper because you’ve learned when it’s necessary and when behaviour will do the job better.

#4 – Act Breaks Are Biological, Not Structural Labels

A lot of writers understand the three-act structure the way they understand grammar; they know the terms, they can diagram a sentence, but they don’t feel it in their gut.

Act breaks become decorative. The story dips around the midpoint. Things get hard in Act Two. The protagonist learns something. Fine. Correct. Also completely lifeless.

In screenwriting, act breaks are biological. They exist because human beings watching a story need a moment of re-orientation, a hard shift that resets what they thought they knew about the story’s direction. It’s not a checkpoint. It’s a door slamming.

Everything Everywhere All At Once does this spectacularly. The Daniels don’t just move the story forward; they completely upend your understanding of what the story is at each act break. You think you’re watching one thing, and then suddenly you’re watching something entirely different, and somehow it’s the same story. That’s architecture, not accident. 

Novelists whose middles feel saggy often diagnose the wrong problem; they think nothing is happening when actually nothing is changing. A single hard reversal (not a twist, a reversal) resets the clock completely.

#5 –  Tension And Suspense Are Different Tools, And You Need Both.

Hitchcock explained this better than anyone: suspense is knowing a bomb is under the table. Tension is not knowing if anyone will find it.

These sound similar, but the mechanics are opposite. Suspense requires you to give the audience more information than the characters have. Tension requires you to give them less.

Most novelists default to tension. We withhold. We tease. It’s our instinct. And it works, but only one note played forever eventually stops registering.

Suspense requires a counterintuitive generosity: telling the reader something the characters don’t know, and then watching the gap between those two states drive you absolutely mad. This is nerve-wracking to write because it feels like you’re giving away too much. You’re not. You’re creating a different kind of dread.

Succession (yes, I know, TV, not film, but the pilot episode alone deserves mention) does this constantly.
We know Logan is testing his children. They don’t. Every scene between them becomes unbearable
because of that gap. 

Similarly, Pig, Nicolas Cage’s extraordinary quiet film, works on pure suspense logic. We know something terrible happened. We watch everyone else slowly catch up. Screenwriting forces you to be precise about which tool you’re using in which scene. Novel writers who learn this distinction have twice as many pacing levers to pull.

#6 – You Are Allowed to Skip The Boring Bits.

A screenplay might cover twenty years in ninety pages. Screenwriters learn, immediately, ruthlessly, that transitional time is dead weight.

You don’t need to show how the characters got from A to B. You need to show A, and then show B, and trust your audience to understand that time has passed.

Novelists often feel a moral obligation to account for every hour. The journey to the destination.

The days between conversations. The character wakes up, makes coffee, and sits down; then the scene begins. This conscientiousness murders pacing.

The Power of the Dog, Jane Campion’s film, covers months of psychological torment across a wide-open landscape, but every scene transition is a hard cut. No journeys. No arrivals. No “meanwhile, back at the ranch.” You are simply there, in the next moment that matters. 

When I stopped writing transitions in my novels and started trusting the reader to make the jump, my chapters got tighter, and the reading experience got faster without a single event being cut.

#7 – Your Subplot Is A Pacing Tool, Not A Detour.

Here’s one that surprised me: in screenplay structure, a subplot isn’t really a side story. It’s a pressure valve for the main plot.

When the A-story needs to coil before it releases, when you’re building toward something, and you can’t detonate it yet, the B-story gives the reader movement without advancing the main tension.

They’re still active, still engaged, but the main story is gathering itself.

This is why well-constructed films never feel slow, even when the main character is standing still.
Something is always moving.

Belfast does this beautifully. Kenneth Branagh’s main story follows a young boy as he navigates his family’s decision to leave Northern Ireland. But wound through it is the subplot of the grandparents’ relationship: quieter, warmer, moving at a completely different pace. It doesn’t slow the film. It controls the film’s breathing. Without it, the central story would feel relentless.

With it, the audience arrives at the big emotional moments with their hearts open rather than armoured.

Novelists who feel their subplots are making their book longer are misreading what it’s doing. A well-placed subplot makes the main story hit harder. It’s not decoration. It’s engineering.

I didn’t set out to become a novelist who thinks like a screenwriter. I set out to take the easy route and write something short. The joke was absolutely on me.

But what I got in exchange for all those drafts, all those brutal coverage notes, all those pages of work
that will never see a cinema screen, was something genuinely useful: I learned to think about time.

Not word count, not chapter length, actual time. The time a reader sits with your story, the rhythms they need, the moments where you have to slam a door or open a window or get out of the room entirely before you’ve overstayed your welcome.

Write a screenplay. Turn it into a novel. Your readers will feel the difference even if they never know why.

Would love to get your input in the comment box below.

The post The Pacing Trick Novelists Keep Missing. appeared first on Vered Neta.

Let’s talk about the scene that’s quietly running your story without getting any of the credit.

You know the midpoint. It sits right there, smack in the middle of Act Two, which, let’s be honest, is already the part of the story most writers dread. There’s a reason the second act is nicknamed the swamp.

Writers pour enormous energy into their opening pages (because first impressions!) and their endings (because that’s what readers remember!), but the middle act? That’s where threads get dropped, pacing goes wobbly, and even the most confident writer starts to wonder if their story actually has a point.

The swamp swallows writers whole. And the midpoint, the very centre of that swamp, tends to suffer the most. It gets treated like a waystation rather than the pivotal structural moment it actually is. A place to rest, recap, and maybe raise a little tension before cracking on. A few things happen. Someone finds a clue. A relationship deepens. The hero makes a decision.

And then the story continues… kind of the same as before.

Here’s the problem: the midpoint isn’t a waystation. It’s a detonation point.
Used correctly, it doesn’t just advance the story, it reorients it. Everything your protagonist thought they understood about their situation, their goal, and themselves gets flipped on its head. And used badly? It’s invisible. The story sags. Readers put it down around page 150 and never explain why.

Let’s fix that.

#1 – The Midpoint Is Supposed to Reveal Something Irreversible.

The core job of the midpoint is to introduce information, a discovery, or an event that your protagonist cannot unknow. Not just difficult news. Irreversible news. The kind that means the story can’t go back to what it was.

In Promising Young Woman, the midpoint lands when Cassie discovers that her best friend Nina’s rape was recorded, and that the video has been circulating for years among people who have been living normal, cheerful lives ever since. 

The film was already a revenge thriller, but this revelation transforms it. It’s no longer about one terrible night. It’s about an entire ecosystem of complicity. The story can’t go back to what it was before that moment, and neither can Cassie.

That’s what a midpoint revelation does. It doesn’t just raise stakes; it redefines what the story is actually about.

Tip for Writers: Ask yourself: if your protagonist learned this information in chapter one, would it change the entire story? If yes, you might have a midpoint revelation. The test is irreversibility, not just bad news, but can’t-go-back news.

#2 – Most Writers Confuse “Plot Complication” with “Revelation.”

This is the trap. You’ve got your protagonist in a tricky situation, so you throw another problem at them: a car that won’t start, an ally who betrays them, a new obstacle on the road to the goal. That’s a complication. It makes things harder. But it doesn’t reveal anything. A revelation changes meaning, not just difficulty.

In Tár, the midpoint isn’t simply that Lydia’s past behaviour is catching up with her professionally.
The revelation, delivered quietly, almost bureaucratically, is that the young conductor whose career she destroyed has died by suicide. 

The story isn’t about a powerful woman navigating cancellation anymore. It’s about culpability and what happens when consequences arrive too late to feel like justice. The moral weight of every earlier scene recalibrates instantly.

Complication: things are harder. Revelation: things are different.

Tip for Writers: After you write your midpoint scene, ask: Does this change what the story means, or just what the character faces? If it’s only the latter, dig one layer deeper. Find the moral or emotional truth hiding underneath the plot event.

#3 – The “False Peak” Is Actually a Trap
(The Good Kind).

One of the most elegant uses of the midpoint is the false victory, sometimes called the “false peak.” The protagonist appears to win. They’ve got what they wanted. Everything looks great. Champagne. Hugs. Sunsets.

Except, of course, it’s not over.

In The Holdovers, there’s a gorgeous false peak when Paul and Angus begin to genuinely connect over the holidays, they find unexpected warmth in each other, and it feels, briefly, like this mismatched pair might come out of the Christmas break changed for the better. 

And then the revelation arrives: Angus’s stepfather is pulling strings to get him into military school, and the tentative hope of the first half collapses into something far more urgent and painful. What looked like a healing story turns out to be about people who have nothing left to lose.

The false peak works because it causes the crash. Don’t waste it.

Tip for Writers: Build your false peak by letting your protagonist almost believe they’ve arrived. Let the reader believe it too. The higher you lift them, the harder the revelation lands. If your midpoint doesn’t give the audience a brief exhale, you’re missing the setup for the gut-punch.

#4 – The Midpoint Must Change Your Protagonist’s Internal Stakes, Not Just External Ones.

Exterior plot shifts are satisfying. Interior shifts are resonant. The best midpoint revelations land on both levels simultaneously.

In The Secret Life of Bees, Lily’s midpoint revelation is learning the truth about her mother’s connection to the Boatwright sisters, and with it, the possibility that the version of her mother she’s been carrying (as both villain and saint) might be wrong.

The external mystery shifts, yes. But the internal stakes, how Lily relates to her grief, her shame, her longing, shift even more profoundly.

Ask yourself: what does your protagonist believe at the midpoint that they didn’t believe before? And what does that belief cost them emotionally?

Tip for Writers: Write two versions of your midpoint revelation: one that only affects the plot, and one that also forces your protagonist to question something about themselves. The second version is almost always the right one. Character and plot revelations should arrive at the same moment.

#5 – The Midpoint Revelation Should Make the First Half Look Different in Retrospect.

This is the magic trick. The very best midpoint revelations don’t just change what’s coming, they recontextualise everything that already happened.

You look back and see the clues, the texture, the foreshadowing that was hiding in plain sight.

Knives Out does this with breathtaking efficiency. At the midpoint, we learn Marta actually didn’t accidentally poison Harlan; she gave him the correct medication, and he orchestrated his own death. 

The mystery completely reframes itself. Every suspicious character, every red herring, every scene you watched now means something different. You want to rewind immediately.

When your midpoint revelation makes a reader (or viewer) want to go back to the beginning, you’ve done it right.

Tip for Writers: Before you write your midpoint, plant three things in Act One that will look different after the revelation. They don’t need to be obvious clues; they can be throwaway lines, a character’s odd reaction, a detail in a setting. The midpoint revelation should work like a lens, suddenly bringing those moments into focus.

#6 – Don’t Let Your Protagonist Be Passive in the Revelation Scene.

Here’s a quiet but deadly mistake: the protagonist learns the truth while standing in a doorway, reading a letter, or overhearing a conversation.

The revelation happens to them. They receive it. They stand there, stunned. They cry a little. The revelation should come from them, or at the very least, demand an immediate, active response that reveals character.

In The Power of the Dog, Phil’s midpoint revelation isn’t handed to him; he has been pursuing Peter, trying to understand him, half-contemptuous and half-fascinated. When he begins to grasp that Peter is not who he assumed, the revelation forces Phil to immediately reconfigure his own power and desire. He can’t stay still. The revelation activates him. And that activation is what drives the entire second half.

Your protagonist should lean into the moment of revelation, not just receive it like a registered letter.

Tip for Writers: Rewrite your midpoint revelation scene so that your protagonist has to do something in response within the same scene, not later, not in the next chapter. Immediate action (even a small one) transforms a passive revelation into a character-defining moment.

#7 – A Good Midpoint Revelation Creates a New Question, Not Just an Answer.

Writers often think revelations are about answering something. The killer is revealed. The secret is out. The truth arrives.

But the most effective midpoints answer one question only to open a bigger, more urgent one.

In Big Little Lies, the midpoint revelation that Perry is the abuser reframes the question from who killed whom at the fundraiser to how did these women get here, and what are they capable of to protect themselves and each other? The answer opened a far more interesting story than the question it closed.

Great midpoints leave your audience with a question they desperately need answered, one that didn’t exist before

Tip for Writers: After your midpoint revelation, write down the single most urgent question your reader now has. If you can’t articulate it clearly, neither can your reader, and they’ll lose momentum. The new question is the engine of your second half. Make sure it’s running.

Before you finalise your midpoint, sit down and answer these three questions in writing:

If the answer to that last question is yes, you don’t have a midpoint revelation. You have a plot bump.

Go back, dig deeper, and find the thing that actually reorients the story. It’s in there, it’s always in there. But it doesn’t arrive until you stop settling for the version that merely keeps the plot moving and start asking what the story is actually about.

The midpoint is the moment your story finally tells the truth. Make sure you’re listening.

Would love to get your input in the comment box below.

The post Why Your Midpoint Is Weak (And How to Fix It). appeared first on Vered Neta.

Go looking for writing advice, and you’ll find an obsession with openings. The first shot. The first image on the page. The first line that hooks the reader. There are entire books dedicated to the art of the beginning.

But here’s what’s curious: for all that ink spilt on first impressions, there’s remarkably little discussion about the last image. The final shot, the one the audience carries out of the cinema. The closing image a reader holds long after they’ve shut the book.

We talk endlessly about how stories begin. We talk surprisingly little about how they end, and specifically, about why the final image almost always outlasts the final words.

Ask someone about a film’s closing scene, and they’ll describe the frame before they quote the dialogue.
The image lands first. The image stays longest. And that’s no coincidence. It’s how human memory and storytelling work, and once you understand why, it changes the way you watch films, write scripts, and think about what a story’s final moment is actually for.

#1 – Images Bypass the Brain’s Editor.

Here’s the slightly unsettling truth about how we process stories: language has to pass through comprehension before it becomes feeling.

We hear words, decode them, extract meaning, and then feel something.
It’s fast… but it’s a process.

Images skip several of those steps entirely.

When you see something visually powerful: a face, a landscape, a gesture, a colour, the emotional response fires before the analytical brain has time to catch up. This is why you can watch a film in a language you don’t speak and still cry at the right moments. The image lands before your mind can argue with it.

Final lines, no matter how beautifully written, have to survive that linguistic filtering.
Final images don’t. They arrive directly.

This is why the wordless ending of Parasite, the son watching from the window, understanding that his father is never coming back, the camera slowly pulling away, hits with such devastating force. There are no words to process. There’s just the image, and then the feeling, and then the credits.

For writers: If your final scene relies entirely on dialogue to land its emotional punch, ask whether the images in that scene are doing any work at all. They should be.

#2 – The Last Image Is the Story’s Emotional Signature.

Think of the final shot as the frame you’d put on the wall to represent the entire film.

It’s the distillation, the one image that, if someone who hadn’t seen the story looked at it, would give them a feeling (not information, but a feeling) about what they’d just missed.

The final shot of La La Land is a perfect example. Mia and Sebastian look at each other across a jazz club: a glance, a half-smile, a nod, and the film ends.

What it captures isn’t the story’s plot. It captures its feeling: the bittersweet truth that love and dreams can both be real, and both be lost, and that the loss doesn’t cancel the love. That image is the film’s argument, rendered visually.

You could write a ten-page essay explaining that theme. Damien Chazelle did it in a three-second look.

Contrast this with films where the final dialogue over-explains the meaning, where characters essentially narrate the theme for the audience. Those films rarely stay with you, because they’ve told you how to feel rather than made you feel it.

For writers: The final image should evoke the theme, not merely illustrate it. There’s a difference. Illustration is intellectual. Feeling is visceral.

#3 – Silence Amplifies Everything.

One reason final shots stick is that most of them are quiet, or at least quieter than everything that came before. After the chaos of a narrative, the stillness of a final image creates space for the audience’s own emotional response to flood in.

Final lines, by contrast, break the silence.
They demand attention and processing at the exact moment when the audience most wants to simply feel.

This is why Inception, a film where the entire final moment is constructed around a single object (the spinning top) and the deliberate withholding of information. Christopher Nolan cuts to black before we know whether it falls. The audience gasps. They’re still arguing about it fifteen years later. No line of dialogue could have done that. Only an image, and silence, and an ending that refuses to close.

For writers: Silence is a tool, not an absence. What you don’t show or say in a final moment is as powerful as what you do.

#4 – Final Images Create a Myth, Final Lines Create a Quote.

There’s a reason film quotes become T-shirts and final images become posters.

Quotes are reproducible. They travel through language, from person to person and from context to context. “You can’t handle the truth.” “I see dead people,” “Show me the money”: these are cultural shorthand, great fun at parties, genuinely indicative of a film’s personality, but ultimately detachable from their source. They exist as language.

Final images create something closer to a myth. They embed themselves in cultural memory not as something to be said but as something to be seen, or rather, re-seen, internally, every time someone thinks about that film.

The final shot of Planet of the Apes, Charlton Heston on his knees in front of the half-buried Statue of Liberty, is one of the most reproduced images in cinema history. Generations of people who’ve never seen the film know that image. It’s become mythological, detached from its narrative and existing as a pure symbol.

More recently, the closing image of Arrival, Louise standing in sunlight, knowing everything she will lose and choosing it anyway, has become something similar for a generation of sci-fi fans. It doesn’t need a caption. It means something, visually, on its own.

For writers: Ask whether your final image could stand alone, not as a spoiler, but as an emotion. If it only makes sense in context, it may not be doing enough work.

#5 – The Body Remembers Images; The Mind Remembers Lines.

Here’s something memory researchers have known for a while: emotional memories are stored differently from factual ones.

Emotional memories are overwhelmingly sensory. They’re encoded with images, sounds, smells, and physical sensations.

When a final image hits hard, grief, joy, unease, wonder, it gets stored in the part of the brain that holds experiences, not information. It’s remembered the way you remember a real moment in your life, not the way you remember a fact you learned.

Final lines, however beautifully crafted, are processed primarily as language, which means they compete with every other piece of language your brain is holding. Images have far less competition in emotional memory.

This is why the final shot of Nomadland Fern driving away into an open, endless road, her tiny van swallowed by the vast American landscape, has stayed with audiences long after the credits rolled. Almost nobody can recall exactly what she says in those final moments. But everyone remembers that road, that smallness, that strange mixture of loneliness and freedom. The image is felt. The words are processed.

For writers and viewers alike: This is good news. It means the final image of a story has an almost unfair emotional advantage. Use it deliberately. As a viewer, trust what you feel; your body often understands the ending before your brain does.

#6 – The Final Shot Is the Story’s Last Breath –  Make It Count.

All of this comes down to one thing: a story’s final image is its last act of communication with the audience. After it ends, the screen goes dark, and the audience is left alone with whatever that image gave them.

The best filmmakers and showrunners understand this intuitively. They treat the final shot not as a conclusion but as a gift, the thing they’re leaving in the audience’s hands to carry home.

The closing shot of Fleabag, Phoebe Waller-Bridge walking away, turning to look at the camera one last time, and then simply… not looking back, is heartbreaking, funny, and perfect all at once. It says goodbye to the audience in a way no line of dialogue could. It breaks the fourth wall, then seals it. And it stays with you long after the credits roll.

Contrast this with stories that end by explaining their ending: a voiceover, a character summarising what happened, a line of dialogue that closes the loop a little too neatly. These endings are sometimes satisfying in the moment. They are almost never the ones you remember.

For writers: Your final image is your handshake with the audience as they leave. Make it mean something. Make it feel like something. And then, this is the hard part: trust them to carry it.

Words are how we understand stories. Images are how we remember them.

This isn’t an argument against great final lines like: “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship” which didn’t become iconic by accident, and it didn’t become iconic without that fog-shrouded image behind it. The best endings fuse both: a line that resonates and an image that burns itself into memory.

But when you’re crafting an ending, or watching one, pay attention to what the camera is doing in those final seconds. What the light looks like. What the character’s face is doing. Whether there’s silence or sound. Whether the camera moves or stays still.

Because the dialogue will fade, the image will still be there. The story ended in words. But it lives on in pictures.

Now it’s YOUR turn – Which ending do you wish you could see for the first time again?

Would love to get your input in the comment box below.

The post Why Final Shots Outlast Final Words. appeared first on Vered Neta.

Let’s talk about scientists.

Not the ones who stand at a whiteboard looking confused in the background of a thriller, or the ones who appear in scene three specifically to explain the plot and then die. The real ones, the fictional scientists who steal scenes, break hearts, and occasionally threaten the structural integrity of spacetime.

Because here’s the thing: when writers get scientists right, they become some of the most compelling characters in any story. And when writers get them wrong, you end up with a bearded man in glasses saying “the readings are off the charts” and then disappearing forever.

The scientist, done well, is a character type with almost unfair dramatic advantages. Here are seven of them.

#1 – Their Obsession Is Socially Acceptable… Until It Isn’t.

Every profession has its version of “too much.” The lawyer who can’t turn off. The doctor who works 90-hour weeks.

But for scientists, obsession isn’t a red flag; it’s basically the job description.

They are expected to dedicate their entire waking existence to a single question. Nobody pulls a scientist aside and says, “Hey, maybe ease up on the particle physics.“

Which means they never see the line coming. Because nobody told them there was one.

In Annihilation, Natalie Portman‘s biologist, Lena, walks into an alien ecosystem actively rewriting the DNA of everything within it, and while her colleagues are experiencing what most of us would call a completely reasonable psychological breakdown, Lena is taking notes. Leaning in. Looking closer. The gap between her response and everyone else’s is where the film’s entire horror lies.

Writer’s Lesson: A scientist’s obsession doesn’t announce itself as dangerous. It masquerades as professionalism. Use that camouflage. Let your scientist drift into catastrophic territory while remaining genuinely, sincerely convinced they’re just doing their job.

#2 – The Stakes Are Always Planetary.

A rogue lawyer ruins a career. A rogue doctor harms a patient. A rogue scientist can, and this is said with complete seriousness, end all life on Earth.

This is not a dramatic exaggeration. It is a structural feature of the profession.

Scientists work with forces that operate at scales no human being was designed to comprehend, which means the distance between “breakthrough” and “extinction event” can be surprisingly short and surprisingly poorly signposted.

Oppenheimer is the obvious, devastating example. The moment Oppenheimer and his team calculate a small but non-zero chance that the Trinity test could ignite the entire atmosphere, and then proceed anyway, is one of the most quietly terrifying scenes in recent cinema. They did the maths. They accepted the odds. They lit the fuse.

And then they stood in the desert and watched.

Writer’s Lesson: The scientist’s stakes are uniquely suited to epic storytelling, but don’t let them stay abstract. Ground the planetary consequences in a single human calculation: this person chose this, knowing the possible cost. The bomb is just the backdrop. The choice is the story.

#3 – They Are Fluent in a Language Nobody Else Speaks.

Every profession has its jargon, but scientific knowledge creates a particular kind of loneliness. The scientist understands something, genuinely, precisely, completely, that the rest of the room cannot follow.

That gap is both their superpower and their curse, and it can express itself in all sorts of dramatically useful directions: arrogance, isolation, the desperate hunger to be believed, or the weary resignation of someone who gave up explaining years ago.

In The Martian, Mark Watney is stranded on Mars with a rapidly dwindling food supply, no way to contact Earth, and absolutely no business being as cheerful as he is. His survival depends entirely on his ability to think scientifically, and what Weir brilliantly understood is that the scientist’s private language, usually a source of alienation, becomes Watney’s lifeline.

He solves his way out of death, problem by problem. We can’t keep up with all the biochemistry. We don’t need to. We follow the confidence. The particular calm of someone who trusts their own mind even when the universe is actively trying to kill them.

Writer’s Lesson: You don’t need to make your audience scientifically literate. You need to make them feel what it’s like to be inside a mind that works that way, precise, methodical, and weirdly serene under pressure. That’s the real translation job, not a technical one.

#4 – Failure Has a Different Weight.

When a surgeon makes a mistake, someone suffers immediately. When a scientist makes a mistake, sometimes the world doesn’t find out for a decade.

Sometimes it finds out when something starts dying. The relationship between a scientist and their failure is unlike almost any other profession, delayed, diffuse, and often irreversible by the time it surfaces.

Never Let Me Go is one of the most quietly devastating explorations of this. The scientists responsible for the world Ishiguro creates never appear on screen, but their work, the systematic creation of human clones as organ farms, saturates every frame.

The horror isn’t theatrical. It’s the accumulated weight of choices made incrementally, rationalised at each step, and never revisited. Nobody woke up one morning and decided to be a monster. They just kept going. Because the science worked.

Writer’s Lesson: Write the failure before you write the scientist. Know what they got wrong, what it cost, and, crucially, whether they know yet. That invisible history will make every scene they appear in carry extra weight, even the ones that seem to have nothing to do with it.

#5 – They Have a Complicated Relationship With God.

Not necessarily religion, but with the concept of limits. The scientist, by vocation, is someone who pushes against the edge of what is known.

That impulse is inseparable from a question every great scientist eventually has to sit with: are there things we shouldn’t know? And if so, honestly, who decides?

This gives the scientist a natural interiority that other professions don’t automatically supply. They don’t just act. They consider whether they should act. Sometimes they do this thinking in real time, in the middle of doing the thing, which is arguably worse.

Ex Machina approaches the question from a darker angle. Oscar Isaac’s Nathan has built a genuinely conscious AI, and the film’s slow-building horror lies in the fact that his curiosity was authentic. He wasn’t cackling in a lab. He was asking a real question about consciousness, and the question consumed him so completely that he never once stopped to ask whether his method was a form of cruelty.

Writer’s Lesson: Give your scientist a moment where they can stop, and don’t. What they’re chasing, and why they can’t put it down, is their character in its purest form. Everything else is just context.

#6 – They Fall in Love With the Problem, Not the Solution.

Most professions are goal-oriented. The lawyer wants to win. The detective wants to close the case. The soldier wants to survive and get home.

The scientist is different: for them, the problem itself is the object of desire. A solved problem is, in a certain sense, a dead one. What comes next is always another, deeper question.

Which means the scientist is structurally incapable of satisfaction, and that is absolutely magnificent for storytelling.

It also means they form something close to a romantic attachment to whatever they’re studying. Not to the outcome. Not to the prize or the publication or the Nobel. To the mystery. And like all romantic attachments, this one distorts judgment, enables obsession, and occasionally flattens everything else in its path.

Contact makes this even more explicit. Ellie Arroway’s lifelong pursuit of the question of whether we are alone is so deep, so woven into who she is, that when the answer finally arrives, she is nearly destroyed by the fact that no one will believe her. She didn’t want the answer for the career boost. She wanted it the way other people want to be loved.

Writer’s Lesson: Don’t give your scientist a goal. Give them a fixation. A goal can be achieved and filed away. A fixation reorganises the entire personality around itself. Ask what question your scientist would keep chasing even knowing it could never be fully answered, then watch what that does to them.

#7 – Curiosity Is the Most Morally Neutral Motivation in Fiction.

Love, revenge, ambition, and survival all carry ethical weight the moment you introduce them. Curiosity, uniquely, does not. It is not good or evil. It simply, relentlessly, wants to know.

That moral neutrality is what makes the scientist such a perfect character for complex stories, because their core motivation doesn’t predetermine anything.

The same curiosity that produces a vaccine can also produce a bioweapon. The same impulse that maps the genome can draw up a eugenics programme. The motivation is identical. The outcome depends entirely on everything else, which is, of course, exactly where the drama is.

Project Hail Mary shows the same curiosity deployed in the opposite direction, to gorgeous effect. Ryland Grace wakes alone in deep space with no memory of who he is or why he’s there, and reconstructs both his mission and his identity using the only tool he has: the scientific method. This quality that makes Nathan (Ex Machina) terrifying makes Ryland one of the most purely joyful protagonists of recent fiction. Same fuel. Completely different fire.

Writer’s Lesson: The most unsettling scientific antagonists aren’t driven by evil. They’re driven by curiosity that has never learned to ask permission. Write that character, the one for whom the question is always more important than the consequences of answering it, and you won’t need a traditional villain. You’ll have something considerably more interesting.

Because their greatest virtue and their most dangerous quality are the same thing.

The mind that is brilliant enough to save the world is, almost by definition, the mind most likely to accidentally end it. There’s no version of the scientist character that lets you keep the gift while safely removing the risk. They come together, or not at all.

When you build a scientist, ask yourself three things:
1. What question are they trying to answer?
2. What would they sacrifice to answer it?
3. At what point, if ever, does the question itself become the problem?

Answer those, and you don’t just have a profession. You have a person standing at the edge of something enormous, staring straight into it, notebook in hand.

Now go write. The universe is waiting to be misunderstood.

Now it’s YOUR turn – Which fictional scientist crossed the line – and did you forgive them?

Would love to get your input in the comment box below.

The post The Character Who Could Save the World…Or End It. appeared first on Vered Neta.

I’m a total sucker for a good origin story. There’s something almost addictive about peeling back a character’s layers to discover why they fear commitment or carry a specific, worn-out trinket. 

Backstory is the heartbeat of your character, the soil where their present-day personality grows.

But it’s also easy to get stuck in the mud. I’ve seen brilliant stories stall because the author got too excited about what happened twenty years ago and forgot what’s happening now.

Think of backstory like a backpack. Your character needs it for the journey, but if you overpack, they’ll topple over before the end of Chapter One.

Let’s look at some of the most common backstory mistakes, and, more importantly, how to avoid them, with examples that show both sides of the coin.

#1 – The Info-Dump That Kills the Scene.

There’s nothing quite like a scene that comes to a grinding halt so a character can explain… everything.

A perfect (and slightly painful) example is
The Hobbit Trilogy.

While I adore Middle-earth, the films suffered from massive “backstory bloat.”

To turn one slim book into three epics, we were treated to extensive prologues and flashbacks detailing the entire history of the Lonely Mountain before we even got to know Bilbo Baggins.

It felt like sitting through a long PowerPoint presentation before the party actually started.

Now compare that to Stranger Things. Think about Eleven. When we first meet her, we know nothing.
We see a buzz-cut, a hospital gown, and a waffle.

We learn her backstory in tiny, agonising, high-stakes drips. A flash of a lab coat here, a memory of a sensory deprivation tank there. Because the information is “drip-fed” to us only when it’s relevant to her current trauma, we are leaning in, desperate for more, rather than leaning back and checking our watches.

The difference is simple but crucial: one explains, the other reveals.

Tip For Writers – If you find yourself writing paragraphs of explanation, it’s usually a sign that the scene itself isn’t doing the work. Backstory should feel like something the audience is uncovering, not something they’re being handed.

#2 – The Backstory We Didn’t Come For.

Sometimes the issue isn’t HOW backstory is delivered…it’s that it exists at all.

Take The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which opens with a long sequence about Peter Parker’s parents and a conspiracy involving aeroplanes and secret files.  It’s dramatic, sure, but it also raises a quiet question in the audience’s mind: Why are we watching this?

We came for Spider-Man. Instead, we’re stuck in someone else’s story.

Now contrast that with Black Panther. The film opens with a brief but powerful backstory scene set in 1990s Oakland. It’s not there to distract; it’s there to set up the central conflict between T’Challa and Killmonger.
By the time the story returns to the present, that backstory is already shaping everything that follows.

One pulls us away from the story. The other anchors us more deeply in it.

Tip For Writers – if your backstory doesn’t directly feed the main conflict, it probably doesn’t belong, at least not yet.

#3 – Over-Explaining Because You Don’t Trust the Audience.

This one comes from a good place. You want to make sure the audience understands.

So you explain things. Then clarify them. Then have another character repeat them, just in case anyone blinked.

The result is dialogue that feels strangely unnatural, people telling each other things they already know, purely for the audience’s benefit.

A good example of this is Tenet. Now, this is a smart, ambitious film, but it’s also one where characters frequently stop to explain the rules of the world in dense, technical dialogue. Instead of feeling intrigued, the audience often feels like they’re trying to catch up with a lecture.

Now compare that to Succession. We’re dropped into a world of power, money, and complicated family history, and almost nothing is explicitly explained. We don’t get a neat breakdown of who betrayed whom ten years ago. We infer it through the way the characters speak, insult each other, and manoeuvre for control.

One tries to make sure we understand everything. The other trusts us to figure things out. And that trust makes all the difference.

Tip For Writers – Cut the dialogue where one character explains something the other character definitely already knows. Trust your audience to connect the dots.

#4 – When Backstory Takes Over the Story.

There’s a point where backstory stops supporting the narrative and starts competing with it.

A stronger example of this is The Many Saints of Newark. The film is so focused on building the past of characters from The Sopranos, who they were, how they’re connected, and what shaped them, that it often feels like a collection of explanations rather than a story with its own momentum.

Instead of pulling us into a compelling present narrative, it keeps nudging us with, “Look, this is why that thing you already know eventually happens.”

And unless you’re deeply invested in those connections, the story starts to feel… secondary.

Now compare that to The Last of Us. his series famously takes massive “detours” into the past, most notably the episode focused on Bill and Frank. On paper, it’s a total interruption of the main journey.

However, it works because it mirrors the theme. By showing a beautiful, tragic life built during the apocalypse, it raises the stakes for Joel and Ellie’s relationship. It isn’t a distraction; it’s an emotional roadmap for what’s to come.

One leans on the past to justify oneself. The other uses the past to elevate what’s happening right now.
That’s the difference.

Tip For Writers –If you’re writing a flashback, ask: “Does this scene help the audience understand the hero’s current dilemma, or am I just geeking out over their history?” If it’s the latter, cut it.

#5 – Tragic Backstory Without Emotional Impact.

A sad backstory doesn’t automatically create emotion.

We’ve all seen characters with deeply tragic pasts that somehow leave us completely unmoved. The ingredients are there: loss, pain, hardship, but the emotional connection isn’t.

Why? Because the backstory exists in isolation.

Take a look at Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, the film introduces several characters with convoluted, tragic lineages. We are told about their suffering through heavy dialogue and dramatic reveals, but because that pain doesn’t manifest in their daily habits or choices, it feels like we’re just reading a “tragedy resume.”

Compare that to Joker. Arthur Fleck’s trauma isn’t just a backstory reveal; it is the engine of his present-day breakdown. We see how his history of abuse and neglect has manifested into a physical condition (the laughing) and a psychological desperate need for validation. The past isn’t a “secret” he’s carrying; it’s the lens through which he views every person who crosses him.

One makes you feel the weight of the past. The other just informs you that it exists.

Tip For Writers – Don’t just give your character a scar; show us why they flinch when someone reaches out to touch it. Backstory should be the cause, and the character’s current behavior should be the effect.

#6 – Revealing Backstory Too Early.

It’s incredibly tempting to explain your character upfront. After all, you understand them, you want us to understand them too.

But when backstory arrives before we care, it doesn’t land. It just… passes by.

In Eternals, we’re given a large amount of historical backstory very early on. It’s ambitious and detailed, but because we haven’t yet formed a connection to the characters, much of it feels distant.

Now compare that to Past Lives. The film gives us just enough of Nora and Hae Sung’s childhood connection at the beginning to ground us, but it doesn’t over-explain or dwell. Instead, it moves forward, letting us feel the weight of that shared past as the story unfolds. The deeper emotional context only fully lands later, when we’re already invested in who they’ve become.

One tries to make us care by explaining everything up front. The other trusts that care comes first, and understanding follows. And that shift in timing makes all the difference.

Tip For Writers – Backstory is far more effective when it answers a question the audience is already asking.

#7 – Explaining Everything (And Killing the Mystery).

Mystery is one of the most powerful forces in storytelling. It pulls us forward. It keeps us engaged.

And backstory, when overused, can quietly destroy it.

An unfortunate example is Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. The film leans heavily into explaining, revisiting, and filling in elements of Indiana Jones’s past: his age, his legacy, his history, often in ways that feel overly explicit. Instead of letting the character’s mythos breathe, it keeps circling back to define and contextualise him.

And the more it explains, the less mythic he feels.

Now compare that to Severance. This show does the opposite. It withholds. It gives us fragments of backstory, hints of a larger system, glimpses of who these people were, and it resists the urge to tie everything up neatly. The unanswered questions aren’t frustrating; they’re the engine of the story.

One insists on explaining the legend. The other understands that mystery is the story. And that restraint is what keeps us leaning forward.

Tip For Writers – When some things remain just out of reach, the story expands in the audience’s mind.

Backstory matters. Of course it does.

It shapes who your characters are. It gives weight to their choices. It creates emotional depth.

But it only works when it’s in the service of something larger.

The present story, the thing unfolding right now, is where your audience lives. Backstory is simply the quiet force underneath it, giving it meaning without demanding attention.

Or, to put it another way: Backstory shouldn’t feel like a lecture about the past. It should feel like a shadow that’s always there, even when no one is talking about it.

Now it’s YOUR turn – What’s one character whose backstory was revealed perfectly in your opinion?

Would love to get your input in the comment box below.

The post 7 Backstory Mistakes Killing Your Story. appeared first on Vered Neta.

We spend a lot of time mourning what adaptations lose. The subplots cut, the internal monologues that couldn’t survive the jump to screen, the characters collapsed into one for the sake of running time.

Occasionally, we celebrate what gets gained: a performance that transcends the page, a visual metaphor that lands harder than prose ever could.

But there’s a third thing almost nobody talks about: the moments when the adaptation makes a choice the book was unwilling to make. Not a different choice, or a simpler one.

A braver one. A commitment to a theme, a moral position, or an emotional truth that the source material circled but never quite landed on.

This isn’t about fidelity. It’s about what a story is actually saying, and whether the screen version said it with more guts than the book that started it all.

#1. When the Book Loves Its Villain Too Much.

Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club is a ferocious novel, angry, funny, and deeply unsettling.
But it has one significant weakness: it is completely seduced by Tyler Durden.

As the story progresses, the narrator fades into the background while Tyler’s philosophy devours the page. 

By the end, the bombs fail to go off, the narrator wakes up in a mental hospital thinking he’s in heaven, and Tyler’s minions are running the institution. Nihilism wins. The book simply cannot bring itself to step back from the monster it created.

David Fincher’s film makes a different choice entirely. In the film, the bombs do go off, but crucially, the narrator has already killed Tyler. He stands with Marla’s hand in his, watching the skyline collapse, and Tyler Durden is dead inside him. The chaos happens, and the protagonist survives it as his own person. The wrong side does not win.

Palahniuk himself acknowledged that Fincher’s ending was the more morally committed of the two.
The novel is consumed by Tyler. The film is the one that finally escapes him, and in doing so, turns a cult document into something with genuine backbone.

#2. When the Book Ends Where the Story Is Just Beginning.

Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers is a wry, melancholy portrait of a suburb processing
the inexplicable: a rapture-like event that took 2% of the world’s population, seemingly at random.

Perrotta does what he does best: watches people cope, drift, fall into cults and love affairs, and mostly muddle through. The mystery is never solved.
The grief is never resolved. It is, deliberately, a book without catharsis.

When HBO adapted it with co-creator Damon Lindelof, something remarkable happened. Season one largely followed the novel, and then the series used it as a launchpad. Seasons two and three went somewhere the book was structurally unable to go: into genuine metaphysical territory, chasing questions about faith and meaning that Perrotta could only observe from a safe suburban distance.

By season three, The Leftovers had become a show about whether love is enough to sustain a person in a world that will never give them answers. Perrotta’s novel asked the question. Lindelof’s series was brave enough to attempt an answer, not a neat one, but an answer. 

Perrotta himself described going from “the driver of the car to being sometimes a passenger.”
What he witnessed from that passenger seat was his own premise followed to a place his realist instincts had never allowed him to go.

The series committed where the book had only observed.

#3. When Removing a Voice Reveals More Truth.

Emma Donoghue’s Room is narrated entirely by Jack, a five-year-old who has spent his whole life in a single small room. It’s a stroke of genius: Jack’s innocent, literal perception transforms captivity into something almost tender. 

But it creates one unavoidable limitation: the novel can only go as far as Jack can see. His mother, Joy, is present on every page yet kept at arm’s length. Her grief, her shame, her psychological collapse after their escape, all of it filtered through a child who cannot possibly understand any of it.

When Lenny Abrahamson directed the film and Donoghue wrote the screenplay herself, they made a quietly radical decision: they removed Jack’s exclusive control over the narrative. The film shows us Joy directly. Brie Larson’s post-escape breakdown: the suicide attempt, the brutal television interview, is shown with a rawness the novel, by its own design, could never provide.

The book uses Jack’s innocence as a mercy for the reader. The film refuses that mercy.
It insists we see the adult truth, not just the child’s version of it. That refusal hits harder than any single scene in the novel, precisely because it doesn’t protect us from what survival actually costs.

#4. When the Adaptation Refuses to Explain Itself.

Vikas Swarup’s novel Q & A, yes, the book behind Slumdog Millionaire, is clever and satirical, a series of stories about how a poor Indian man came to know the answers on a game show.

Its message is articulated fairly directly: life itself is the teacher. Swarup always keeps a knowing, ironic distance from his material, watching it with amused intelligence.

Danny Boyle and screenwriter Simon Beaufoy stripped that distance out entirely. They pushed the love story front and centre, made the film kinetic in a way that forces you to feel the chaos of poverty rather than observe it, and committed fully to a structural idea the novel only gestured at, that Jamal’s entire life was preparation for one impossible moment. 

The film’s famous opening question: How did he do it?
A: He cheated.
B: He was lucky.
C: He was a genius.
D: It was written.

It is a genuine philosophical proposition in the film. In the novel, it’s a clever framing device.

Boyle’s film dared to be sincere at a moment when sincerity in cinema was deeply unfashionable.
It believed in destiny without winking at the audience.

The novel hedged. The film believed. Eight Academy Awards later, audiences clearly felt the difference.

#5. When the Book Refuses to Let Its Characters Feel.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is one of the great novels of the last twenty years, and one of the most controlled.

Narrator Kathy has grown up in a mysterious English boarding school and, we slowly understand, is a human clone raised to donate her organs. 

The horror is introduced with such deliberate gentleness that by the time its full weight lands, we’ve already been lulled into the same passivity as the characters. The novel’s genius is inseparable from its numbness. Kathy never rages. She never demands answers. She accepts.

Mark Romanek’s film, with a screenplay by Alex Garland, kept that restraint, but did something the novel, trapped inside Kathy’s composure, could not: it let the other characters crack. 

Tommy’s explosion of grief in a muddy field, screaming into the night at the sheer injustice of what is being done to them, exists only in the film. In the novel, it is described quietly, at a distance, filtered through Kathy’s characteristic calm. On screen, it is raw, prolonged, and deeply uncomfortable.

This is bravery of a specific kind: not changing what the story says, but insisting that someone in the story actually feels it. Ishiguro’s restraint served the novel perfectly.

Romanek recognised that cinema cannot afford that level of removal, and rather than soften the story, he found the one moment where the dam could break. That scene has stayed with audiences far longer than any single passage in the book.

Every example above shares one thing: the adaptation found a place where the source material was flinching, and refused to flinch there.

Palahniuk loved Tyler too much to let him lose. Perrotta was too careful a realist to follow his own premise into the metaphysical. Donoghue, bound by her narrator, couldn’t reveal Joy’s full darkness without dismantling the novel’s architecture. Swarup was too ironic to be sincere. Ishiguro was too restrained to let anyone scream.

None of these is a failure… they are choices, often the right ones for the medium of prose. But they left gaps. And the best adaptations don’t fill those gaps with compromise. They fill them with conviction.

So the question worth asking, whether you’re adapting a book or writing one that might one day be adapted, isn’t just what does this story need me to preserve? It’s the harder one: where is this story flinching? And what would it look like if it didn’t?

That’s where the bravest adaptations live. Not in what they changed, but in what they finally had the courage to say.

Now it’s your TURN – Has a film ever made you feel what the book couldn’t?

Would love to get your input in the comment box below.

The post The Adaptations That Beat Their Own Books. appeared first on Vered Neta.

Ah, the writer in film. That brooding figure hunched over a typewriter (always a typewriter), staring moodily out a rain-soaked window, whiskey glass in hand, waiting for the muse to descend like a golden lightning bolt of pure inspiration. Then… tap tap tap…a masterpiece is born in forty-five minutes of screen time.

If you’ve ever actually tried to write anything longer than a grocery list, you are already laughing. Or crying. Possibly both.

Hollywood has had decades to get writers right. Decades! And yet here we are, watching movies where the craft we love, the messy, wonderful, deeply unglamorous craft of writing, gets flattened into a series of dramatic clichés that bear almost no resemblance to the real thing. We love you, cinema. We really do.
But we need to have a talk.

Because here’s the thing: if you’re a writer, screenwriter, or creative working in this industry, you’ve probably winced at these tropes a hundred times. And if you’re building a writer character into your own story or script, you have a genuine opportunity to do something better, something that will resonate deeply with every creative person in your audience.

So here are seven ways film still gets writers wrong… and what to do instead.

#1 – One Dramatic Moment and Poof Your Writer’s Block Is Gone Forever.

There’s a formula Hollywood adores: writer is blocked → writer experiences Meaningful Life Event → writer sits down and types furiously → writer finishes entire novel/screenplay/memoir by morning.

Limitless is practically built on this premise. Bradley Cooper‘s Eddie Morra can’t write a word until he pops a mysterious pill, and then he hammers out a full novel in four days.

The underlying message is one cinema keeps pushing: writing either flows or it doesn’t, and all you need is the right catalyst.

Instead of this: A writer who is mystically, totally blocked until one external event magically unlocks everything.

✓ Do this: Show a writer who is always partially working, jotting notes they don’t know how to use yet, writing badly on purpose just to get something down, circling a problem from six different angles. The block isn’t a wall. It’s a negotiation. That’s far more interesting to watch, and every writer in your audience will exhale with recognition.

#2 – The Workspace No Real Writer Has Ever Actually Worked In.

Open a film featuring a writer and feast your eyes: floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, vintage typewriter, artfully dim lighting, maybe a fireplace. Papers scattered just so, messy enough to signal genius, organised enough to still be gorgeous.

In Adaptation, Charlie Kaufman’s (Nicolas Cage) fictionalised self is shown in various states of writerly despair, but even his mess is somehow… cinematic.

The real workspace of a working writer is more likely to feature seventeen browser tabs open, a coffee mug that’s been there since Thursday, a sticky note that says “FIX THIS LATER” stuck to the monitor, and a dog staring at them with profound disappointment.

Instead of this: The Pinterest-perfect writer’s den that signals “creative genius lives here.”

✓ Do this: Let the workspace be functionally weird. The writer who works at a kitchen table surrounded by their kids’ drawings. The one who writes only in a specific corner of a specific café and gets mildly panicked if it’s taken. The one with a wall of index cards that looks like a conspiracy theory board, because honestly, it kind of is. Specificity here is everything, and it tells us who your character is without a single line of dialogue.

#3 – The Only Two Writers Hollywood Knows How to Write.

Hollywood has exactly two writer characters: the self-destructive alcoholic spiralling toward greatness, or the charming, slightly scatterbrained romantic who just needs love to find their voice. There is no third option.

There is certainly no “writer who is actually pretty okay, manages their deadlines reasonably well, and has a functional relationship with caffeine.”

Stranger Than Fiction plays brilliantly with this. Will Ferrell‘s Harold Crick is literally narrated by an author (Emma Thompson) whose story is consuming his real life. Emma Thompson’s writer, Karen Eiffel, is a gloriously tormented mess who hasn’t left her apartment in months and smokes as if the building is already
on fire. She’s funny and deeply human. But she’s still firmly in the tortured genius camp, because apparently writers who just… show up and do the work aren’t dramatic enough for a two-hour runtime.

Instead of this: The writer whose personality is their tortured relationship with writing.

✓ Do this: Give your writer a full life that exists alongside their work, not in opposition to it. Let them be competent and still struggling. Let them have a decent morning and a terrible afternoon. The drama doesn’t have to come from their soul; it can come from the gap between what they’re trying to say and what they’re actually managing to put on the page. That gap is universal, relatable, and genuinely rich with conflict.

#4 – The Three-Minute Research Montage.

The writer pulls books off shelves! They squint at microfiche! They interview someone wise in a diner! Cut to: finished manuscript.

Zodiac is a rare exception. Robert Graysmith’s (Jake Gyllenhaal) fixation on the Zodiac killer devours his entire life over years, and the film commits to showing that slow, obsessive erosion.

But most films treat research like a quick warm-up before the real magic begins, when anyone who’s written nonfiction, or heavily researched fiction, knows that research is the work. The writing is almost the easy part once you’ve spent six months buried in source material.

Instead of this: Research as a brief montage that leads neatly to clarity and answers.

✓ Do this: Show research as the place where your writer gets lost, where they find something that blows up their entire thesis, or falls down a rabbit hole that derails three weeks of work, or discovers that the story they thought they were telling is actually a completely different story. That’s where the real drama lives. And every writer watching will nod so hard they risk a neck injury.

#5 – The First Draft That Is Also the Final Draft.

In film, writing scenes almost never includes revision. A character writes something, reads it back, nods with quiet satisfaction, and sends it off. Done. Masterpiece achieved.

Even in Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen’s gorgeous love letter to literary Paris, we see Owen Wilson’s Gil typing away on his novel, but we never really see him tearing it apart, second-guessing every sentence, or realising at 2am that the entire structure is wrong. We see writing, not rewriting, which is the dirty secret of the whole enterprise.

Instead of this: The writer who produces finished, polished work in a single inspired session.

✓ Do this: Let us see the revision. Not as defeat…as craft. There is enormous drama in a writer who realises something isn’t working and has to decide whether to fix it or burn the whole thing down. In a character who reads back yesterday’s pages and thinks it’s either brilliant or garbage and genuinely cannot tell. Revision is where writers actually live, and it’s completely untapped territory on screen.

#6 – The Weeping, Laughing, Fully Unhinged Writing Session.

This one deserves its own category. In Something’s Gotta Give, Diane Keaton‘s playwright Erica Barry sits down at her laptop after a heartbreak and begins to type, and immediately starts sobbing. Then laughing. Then sobbing again.

She writes through the tears, producing what we’re meant to understand is raw, authentic, emotionally fearless work, all while looking like someone having a complete psychological event in real time.

It’s a memorable scene. It is also completely unhinged. Real emotional writing doesn’t usually look like a simultaneous breakdown and breakthrough. It looks like someone is staring very hard at a sentence for twenty minutes and then quietly deleting it.

Instead of this: Visible emotion as proof that the writing is good and real and true.

✓ Do this: Show the emotional aftermath of writing, the writer who finishes a difficult scene and then just sits there, spent, not sure what to do with themselves. Or who writes something true and immediately wants to delete it because it’s too close. The real vulnerability in writing is invisible while it’s happening. That’s what makes it so hard to portray, and so worth trying.

#7 – Success That Arrives Immediately and Fixes Everything.

Writer finishes manuscript. Manuscript becomes a book. The book is celebrated. Life is transformed. Roll credits.

Sex and the City is a perfect example.
Carrie Bradshaw’s collection of love letters becomes a published book with barely a speed bump in sight. No rejection letters. No editorial bloodbath. No eighteen-month wait.

Just: finished writing, published book, cultural moment. Done. Which, honestly, tracks for Carrie, the woman also found a rent-controlled apartment in Manhattan on a columnist’s salary, so we’ve always known she operates in a parallel universe.

Film consistently skips the part where most writers finish a thing and then… wait. Submit. Get rejected. Revise. Resubmit. Wait some more. Question all their life choices. Consider becoming a landscape architect.

The publishing and production industries move at a speed that makes glaciers look impulsive. The average time from finished manuscript to published book is one to three years, after you’ve found an agent, sold it, and survived the editorial process. Hollywood, bless its heart, does not have patience for that particular third act.

Instead of this: Success as the tidy payoff that validates all the suffering.

✓ Do this: Let success be complicated, partial, delayed, or different from what the writer imagined.
Let them finish something and not know if it’s good. Let the validation come from the work itself, not from the world’s response to it. That’s a far more honest and emotionally sophisticated story, and for a creative audience, it will land with a depth that a tidy bow simply never could.

It would be deeply unfair to end without acknowledging the films that actually nail it.
Finding Forrester earns its place in the Writer Hall of Fame for a single line: “You write your first draft with your heart, and you rewrite with your head.” That’s not a cliché. That’s craft wisdom delivered with the confidence of someone who’s actually done it, and it’s the kind of line that makes writers pause the film and sit with it for a minute.

Adaptation deserves enormous credit too, not just for its genius structural games but for the way it treats the act of writing as genuinely, physically painful and, at times, occasionally hilarious.

And Stranger Than Fiction, for all its tortured-genius trappings, at least has the grace to make its writer accountable for her words in the most literal way imaginable.

These films prove it can be done. The writer character who is flawed and functional, specific and surprising, struggling without being broken… they exist. We just need more of them.

Here’s the favour we’re asking. Not on behalf of all writers everywhere, okay, yes, exactly on behalf of all writers everywhere.

Skip the dramatic block that one kiss solves. Skip the tears-and-typing breakdown. Skip the instant bestseller. Give us a writer who negotiates with their own brain daily and mostly loses. Who has a strange, specific ritual that probably doesn’t work, but they do it anyway. Who finishes something and feels not triumphant, but just… quietly relieved. And then immediately starts the next thing because that’s what writers actually do.

That character will ring true to every creative person in your audience.
And honestly? They’ll be way more interesting to watch.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a manuscript that I’m avoiding finishing.

Now it’s YOUR turn – If your writing process were a film genre, what would it be?

Would love to get your input in the comment box below.

The post Why Movies About Writers Are Lying to You. appeared first on Vered Neta.