Screenwriting : Seeking guidence by R.C. Terrill

Google...YouTube...Quora...Chess groups in social media...documentaries (especially CuriosityStream)... I found all of these resources helpful when I needed to learn about things like medieval battles and weaponry, wine making, ocean biology at various depths, etc...

There is a thing called “competency porn”, people like to watch people doing things at an expert level. We don’t need to know exactly what they are doing. We just need to see the confidence and lack of hesitation.

So do you need to explain it. Or can we rely on the excite the audience may feel.

you may also want to search "Star Trek + 4D chess" ... I know they usually play 3D chess there, but considering the 4th dimension is actually Time itself... if there's anyone who may have developed at least a theorhetical concept of how to play it... it would be Trekkers. ... that being said, As Sallie said curiosity stream is an excellent resorce as well. ... and lasltly... considering that the fourth dimension is Time... you may want to look at political and military stratetgies through the ages. Look at the Southern Strategy for instance, which was initiated I believe in the 60s? but was initiated as a "long game", which, 60 years later, is currently reaching a tipping point in sociopolitics and the concept of creating a religiocorporate totalitarian state in which only the 1 percent actually have any freedoms or autonomy. I wish you the best of luck in your quest. :D

Frankly I wouldn't. The preciousness of writing something you've personally experienced or good at is you know details about the stuff no one else could possibly know...and if you have a imagination to dramatize that on a paper, it's a jackpot...

I'd tackle a situation like this with self-reflection. I've made the mistake before of trying to write about things which interest me but I don't fully understand. There's really only two realistic routes to take; 1) dumb the content down and try to side step the details, 2) get out while you can.

It's easy to suggest doing research online, but that's easier said than done and full of pitfalls. There's this old joke about Reddit how, if you take the most popular post about a field you have no experience in, it sounds incredibly insightful, and if you take the most popular post about your field it sounds ridiculous. The net leans heavily toward misinformation overall.

There's certainly a degree of tolerance however, which is subject to genre, format, and target audience. I've been getting scenes of Ford vs Ferrari coming up on Facebook reels lately and I can barely watch it due to how unrealistic it is, but it's not made for me. If I wanted accuracy, I'd watch a documentary.

The solution comes back toward the old adage "write what you know", which in turn goes back to living an interesting life that inspires your stories and themes.

The perfect balance is always going to be individual. There's this really interesting chapter in Joe Eszterhas' book about going through this. He was a proper journalist before becoming a screenwriter and for projects like F.I.S.T he would go and live the life of his characters, in their word, for months before even putting pen to paper, but he was also throwing up every morning from stress. One day, when facing a project about a topic he knew nothing about, the producer told him to just make everything up. He thought it was absurd, but went ahead and had the best writing experience he'd had to date, plus stopped throwing up from stress. He later wrote Basic Instinct, which was procedurally inaccurate but rich in other areas he had a lot of life experience in. That balance worked well for him.