We just launched the Kickstarter for Character Creator Kit, the latest addition to the Writer Emergency Pack family. It’s fun to be back on Kickstarter, where we first debuted Writer Emergency Pack way back in 2014. For a brief time, we were the highest-grossing card project on the site. Character Creator Kit is the brainchild […]
The post Character Creator Kit first appeared on John August.
Since the dawn of storytelling, there have been archetypes. What aspects of archetypes are actually useful for writers? And how do we move beyond tropes to create complex characters? Pick a card, any card! John and Craig play around with the upcoming Creator Character Kit. They draw archetype cards and imagine multifaceted characters that embody […]
The post Archetypes first appeared on John August.
, updated:
What changes when you take off your writer hat and put on your director hat? In this compendium episode, John, Craig, and Scriptnotes coordinator Lauren Loesberg review directing advice previously given on the podcast. John and Craig offer Lauren pointers on directing her next project. They also answer a listener question about directing actors “on […]
The post Directing Your Writing first appeared on John August.
On September 29, 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit affirmed the district court's grant of partial summary judgment to Thomson Reuters in Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Intelligence. The panel (Judges Restrepo, Montgomery-Reeves, and Bove, with Judge Montgomery-Reeves the author of the opinion) held that Westlaw's headnotes are copyrightable and that ROSS's use of them to train an AI legal research tool was not fair use.
The court insists that "this is no more than an ordinary copyright case" (Ross COA Opinion, p. 2). While we do think the effect of this case will be limited on other blockbuster AI cases, this is the first federal appellate ruling on whether copying works to train an AI system is fair use, and it gets two important things wrong.
, updated:
On August 27, 2026, the Fifth Circuit held that a news aggregator that frames headlines and sends readers back to the original publisher’s site does not itself publicly display those articles under the Copyright Act. The Fifth Circuit rejected the Ninth Circuit's "server test," which shields sites that embed or frame content hosted elsewhere from direct liability under the display right. But its reading of the statute leaves embedders in much the same position they were in under the server test.
, updated:
John welcomes writer and actress Zoe Kazan (Ruby Sparks, The Big Sick, She Said) to talk about her sweeping and thorough reimagining of East of Eden, releasing on Netflix on October 1st. They discuss her approach to period piece dialogue, the process of adapting such an expansive novel, and the family history behind this particular […]
The post East of Eden with Zoe Kazan first appeared on John August.