If You Know The Ending… You Know The Beginning (Writing Advice) — Andrew Zinnes

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

Film Courage: Why is it important for a writer to know the ending of their story before they begin pages?

Andrew Zinnes, Author/Senior Teaching Fellow/Script Doctor: Right. Most of the people that we interviewed in our book that we wrote [Screenwriter’s Advice by Andrew Zinnes and Genevieve Jolliffe] almost all those pro writers that we did all 34 down to a T said that was important.

I think you just need to know where you’re going. It’s a whole thing, a story. Everything that you’ve set up in act one or at the beginning needs to come to a crescendo at the climax and wrap up at the end.

I think if you don’t know where you’re going, it’s very easy to get lost along the way. You might follow tangents of story threads that don’t take you there to where you want to go.

Now sometimes that might be good because that as I said before that might be nuances that you didn’t explore before but generally speaking once you have a sense of the world once what’s in that world and you…