Welcome to Kill the Dog: Alchemy Over Recipes

If you’ve spent any time learning how to write a screenplay, you’ve been handed a stack of recipe books. You’ve been told what has to happen on page twelve, when your protagonist is allowed to change their mind, and which beat sheet you have to follow if you want your script to survive. And when a structure-defying, genre-defying film breaks every single one of those rules and becomes a classic anyway, the rulebooks have no answer for why.

The trouble with screenwriting dogma isn’t just that formula goes stale. The trouble is that arbitrary “dos and don’ts” never bother to explain themselves. Structure, genre conventions, and beat sheets don’t actually make a story work—they are just common, convenient ways of scheduling the real mechanism underneath. When a recipe fails you in the middle of a draft, a checklist can’t tell you how to fix it because it never taught you the chemistry in the first place.

That is why this blog exists. My intention is to liberate writers from dogma so we can put the recipe books down for good. Instead of handing you another rigid template, I want to teach the alchemy of storytelling—replacing arbitrary rules with science-backed findings on how the human brain actually responds to stories. My approach is screenplay-first, though because the machinery of the mind is medium-agnostic, novelists and short story writers will find the exact same tools at work in their craft.

Right now, I am building a book called Kill the Dog, and this site is where that project—and the mission behind it—will live. Here is what I plan to do in this space:

• Explain the Machinery, Not the Formula: Instead of treating things like “immersion” as magic tricks you just have to hope for, we will look at the actual cognitive mechanisms that make an audience lock in, care about a stranger, and keep watching.
• Translate Science into Craft: You won’t get buried in textbook neuroscience or academic jargon here. The plan is to take peer-reviewed research in psychology and neuroscience and turn it into practical, repeatable tools you can actually use while writing a scene.
• Practice Radical Intellectual Honesty: Writing advice is full of people dressing up personal opinions as unbreakable laws. Here, we will always separate verified, peer-reviewed findings from working hypotheses—and where the science is still unsettled or has real gaps, I will tell you plainly rather than pretending otherwise.
• Help You Write Without a Beat Sheet: The ultimate goal is to hand you a foundational compass that diagnoses why a script isn’t working and scales to your own voice, rather than forcing your voice into someone else’s map.

You don’t need another guru telling you what to do without telling you why. You just need to understand the mind you’re writing for.

Let’s put the dogma to rest and get to work.