1. Most writers spend their lives exploring a single theme; identifying yours will make fleshing out your stories much easier.

2. Nine out of ten first screenplays are coming of age stories. There's no harm in writing one, but infuse it with a unique perspective.

3. Until you have a firm grasp of the craft of your screenwriting, ignoring notes from reliable sources is ill-advised.

4. Until you have a firm grasp of the craft of your screenwriting, taking every note from unreliable sources is ill-advised.

5. Notes aren't about you; keeping your ego out of it will help you see your story's problems more clearly.

6. Read one hundred screenplays, both good and bad. Then go read another one hundred.

7. Write yourself into as many corners as possible - that's where the real creativity comes from.

8. If you stop talking, your characters will start to talk for themselves.

9. Tend to be talky? Find the key sentence in every speech; keep it and throw everything else out.

10. Prone to long scenes? Find the "trigger moment" in each scene, cut everything before it. If someone says good-bye at the end, you've missed the beat to get out.

11. Learn to love killing your babies. The next babies are always smarter, better looking and better mannered.

12. In screenwriting, the fewer words, the better. Period.

13. Don't bother writing detailed, extended action sequences - they always get changed in pre-production anyway. Just find a couple nifty, eye-catching pieces to excite the director to the possibilities.

14. Every big-budget script needs at least three big set pieces.

15. Ignoring what Hollywood likes will get you absolutely nowhere.

16. Don't look down on genre conventions: they are super-refined rules of storytelling that can only help you write non-genre stories.

17. It's all in the execution - you can write the same story as ten other people, but if your style and approach is unique, yours is the one that will sell. (See #2.)

18. Reaching audiences is secondary to reaching development executives - a script's got to be bought first; concessions, alas, must be made.

19. Theme is crucial and all-powerful, and if done right, your big message will slip past the exec and score with the audience.

20. And of course that old saw: writing is re-writing. (And vice versa.)