Well well well. Look at what the cat dragged in.
Or don’t. Rather, read on so I can tell you I’ve been assembling a list of 10 magic words associated with each discipline I profile in my new 10 Commandments book.
It’s been fairly straightforward for each. The main problem is choosing just one word or phrase per discipline, because there are lots of good candidates.
The one outlier is screenwriting because, unlike pickup or standup comedy or door-to-door sales, screenwriting is not a “live” discipline — there’s no direct and instant feedback to the screenwriter as the movie is being shown to audiences.
Still, the movie industry is huge and has been around for a century. Lots of regularities have emerged in how successful screenplays work, which is why I feature screenwriters in my book.
But what about magic words used by screenwriters?
I had the idea to look at most common words in movie titles, excluding stop words like “a,” “the,” and “and.” I found a Reddit post where some dude did exactly this data analysis, using all movie titles from IMDB.
Unfortunately, the Reddit post doesn’t include a downloadable list, but just a word cloud. In order of size, the most common non-stop words in movie titles are:
1. Love
2. One
3. Black
4. Big
… which gives us the guaranteed blockbuster title, One Big Black Love.
While doing this fascinating research I also found a list of the most common phrases aka cliches used in screenplays.
But I’ll only share that list with you over my dead body. Look, I’m just doing my job. In fact, “job” is my middle name. Or maybe “taking candy from a baby” is my middle name.
In any case, if you haven’t yet gotten a copy of my new 10 Commandments book, you can do so at the link below. When I finish up the 10 Magic Words, I will add that in as bonus to the already bonus 11th Commandment page.
Here’s the link. Go ahead. Click it. Make my day: