Write Your Screenplay Podcast

Why do we stay emotionally locked into a story even when the plot sounds flat on paper—or morally repellent in practice? In this episode, Jacob Krueger breaks down Park Chan-wook’s darkly hilarious, deeply unsettling No Other Choice to reveal the engine that makes it so powerful: not plot, but structure. Using the film’s escalating moral pressure as a case study, Jake shows how structure is built from choices—how characters deal with what happens—and how theme emerges when you drive a protagonist to the moment where they truly feel they have no other choice.

What does it actually mean to adapt a story- and how can radically different adaptations emerge from the same source material? In this episode, Jacob Krueger looks at the novel and film versions of Hamnet and the ’90s award darling Shakespeare in Love to show how finding the location of your adaptation shapes character, structure, tone, and theme—and why successful adaptations are defined less by fidelity to source material than by the clarity of your intentions

What does it actually mean to adapt a story- and how can radically different adaptations emerge from the same source material? In this episode, Jacob Krueger looks at the novel and film versions of Hamnet and the ’90s award darling Shakespeare in Love to show how finding the location of your adaptation shapes character, structure, tone, and theme—and why successful adaptations are defined less by fidelity to source material than by the clarity of your intentions

What if raising the stakes in your screenplay has nothing to do with explosions, danger, or bigger plot events?
In this rerelease of a classic episode, Jake takes on one of the most misunderstood producer notes—raise the stakes—and reframes it from the ground up. Stakes, he explains, don’t begin with what happens on screen. They begin with empathy: our connection to a character, what they want, and how hard it is for them to get it.

Every year, writers make New Year’s resolutions with the best intentions—only to watch those resolutions crumble under real life. The problem isn’t discipline or willpower, but the same structural mistakes that cause character arcs to collapse in screenplays. Learn how to build 2026 resolutions that actually work by drawing on the same techniques writers use to create journeys of lasting change for their characters.