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The kind of written work I'm going to talk about is story-writing, because that's the only kind I know anything about. I'll call any length of fiction a story, whether it be a novel or a shorter piece, and I'll call anything a story in which specific characters and events influence each other to form a meaningful narrative. I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one. Then they find themselves writing a sketch with an essay woven through it, or an essay with a sketch woven through it, or an editorial with a character in it, or a case history with a moral, or some other mongrel thing. When they realize that they aren't writing stories, they decide that the remedy for this is to learn something that they refer to as the "technique of the short story" or "the technique of the novel." Technique in the minds of many is something rigid, something like a formula that you impose on the material; but in the best stories it is something organic, something that grows out of the material, and this being the case, it is different for every story of any account that has ever been written.

Flannery O'Connor
from The Nature and Aim of Fiction (read full)

Blogger's Note: I pride myself on staying out of my own blog posts, however, the inclusion of a non-filmmaker warrants some explanation: I am a great admirer of O'Connor and I believe a lot of her advice carries over to screenwriting. This doesn't mean that exceprts from essays by novelists and other non-filmmakers are going to become the norm, but it does mean that you can probably expect more O'Connor in the future because it is my firm belief that any form of writer can learn a great deal from her.

Her posts will usually be tagged as "screenwriting."