Difference for the sake of difference is as empty an achievement as slavishly following the commercial imperative. Write only what you believe. - Robert McKee

Pity the poor screenwriter, for he cannot be a poet. He cannot use metaphor and simile, assonance and alliteration, rhythm and rhyme, synecdoche and metonymy, hyperbole and meiosis, the grand tropes. Instead, his work must contain all the substance of literature but not be literary. A literary work is finished and complete within itself. A screenplay waits for the camera. If not literature, what then is the screenwriter's ambition? To describe in such a way that as a reader turns pages, a film flows through the imagination.

a convincing impossibility is preferable to an unconvincing possibility.

The music of story is conflict.