>>”Crimetime After Primetime”
Forgot all about that! Loved it!
I really didn’t believe the screenwriting teacher about dialog being mostly partial sentences, so I started typing up conversations I was having with people. Luckily I’m a speed typist. That turned out to be another great learning device.
One trick the teacher taught was finding an image of your character in a magazine, cutting it out and putting it over your keyboard. Then when you wrote, you kept glancing at the image to keep consistency with that particular character.
Another thing I do when I’m writing and I need to hold a mood is put a piece of music on infinite repeat and use that to smooth out my mood.
I think “Dark Justice” was my fave of the revolving shows. Mostly the first year with Ramy Zada playing the judge.
Yeah, I expect writing out full sentences works primarily for books - except for parts containing dialogue. We usually don’t talk back & forth in the same way we write. The “screwball comedies” of the 30s were full of the ping-pong interruptions.
One of my favorite examples of both good dialogue interaction and clever editing is this quick bit from the Universal classic “Dracula”. Immedialtely after the character Jonathon asks Professor Van Helsing what could have caused “those marks” on Mina’s neck, the female house servant announces a visitor:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTr8dXob7YI
I wish I had your keyboard skills. I’m a two-fingered wonder who has to go at it with pen and paper before a thought is gone. But, yeah, there are some fine mental prompts and tricks that help to get the creative juices pumping. I imagine just about every writer has his favorite devices.