In the wake of the Oscars and the multiple achievements of “No Country for Old Men,” I’ve been thinking about the Coen Brothers a lot lately. Especially about what good writers they are. They do all kinds of things with dialogue and structure and symbolism that really shouldn’t work, but because they’re really good literary [...]

Thanks to Chris Roberson at the Interminable Ramble, I recently discovered “What Does the Protagonist Want,” a blog belonging to Todd Alcott. Alcott’s a screenwriter, with “Antz” and few other films to his credit, and he’s really smart about story construction. Last weekend, I spent way more time than I should have browsing through [...]