Screenwriting Quote #168 (Nora Ephron)

“The fundamental thing that’s true of both [journalism & screenwriting] is that there’s a beginning, a middle, and an end. What I really understood as a magazine writer was when the beginning had to start to end, and the middle had to begin, and when the middle had to start to end and when the ending had to begin. And if you know that, you’re halfway to being a screenwriter. People who go to those seminars…and they know there are, let’s say, seventy-six ‘master scenes’… I don’t even know if a ‘master scene’ is an expression! But it’s all broken down mathematically, and I don’t understand any of that. I don’t do it. I never have done it. All that stuff that you learn about act structure, and scene structure, that every scene has three acts, all that stuff…I knew very instinctively from magazine writing.”
Nora Ephron
Interview with Kathryn Borel in The Believer