Xander Bennett is an Australian screenwriter and author. He is a former Hollywoodscript reader, and a resident of Los Angeles. Bennett is best known for his laconic advice about the practice of screenwriting, shared daily in a blog called Screenwriting Tips... You Hack, and for a book of the same name.
Bennett has written for television, videogames, role-playing games, and comics, and is the author of a graphic novel. He has written a series of blogs, culminating in the one which made him famous, Screenwriting Tips... You Hack, on which he has published a screenwriting tip a day since June 2009. He wrote educational comics for Pan Macmillan and worked on Ghostees, a small browser game for BakedOn Entertainment, which hasn't been released yet. He has written tabletop RPG books for The Le Games, Highmoon Media, and Dogsoul Publishing. He lived in Vancouver during 2008, where he did some freelance journalism and copywriting, and worked as a quality assurance tester for Electronic Arts Vancouver. In 2009 he moved to Los Angeles for a year to attend the UCLA Professional Program in Producing. While there he worked as a reader for a minor production company. Bennett administers an online script reading service, Hack Notes. He is managed by Madhouse Entertainment, Los Angeles.
Writing
Blogs
Bennett first published a blog called Chained to the Keyboard while he was living in Queensland, Australia. It ran from October 2005 to June 2006. That was followed by a blog called Childish Things, which ran from 2007 to early 2009. Neither blog is now available online. In Los Angeles, while working as a reader for a minor production company, and frustrated by the quality of the screenplays he was reading, Bennett started tweeting his complaints. Someone told him he should put them in a blog, so he moved to publishing Screenwriting Tips... You Hack as "a snarky diatribe," posting tips once a day on how to make spec scripts better. His first tip read: Franklin Leonard invited Bennett to join The Black List in September 2011, and the entire Screenwriting Tips... You Hack blog migrated to that website. On 21 May 2012, Bennett published Tip #1000:
In 2009, Xander Bennett and Melanie Cook published a graphic novel called Cages. The publisher, Insomnia Publications, ceased trading in 2010 and the status of the novel is now uncertain.
Screenplays
Bennett began writing screenplays in 2004, but has had none produced as yet. In 2010 he developed The Colour of Fear, a feature film, for Rising Swell Productions, a Melbourne based production company.
Screenwriting book
In 2011, on the advice of William H. Akers, Xander Bennett published a book that took the wisdom of his Screenwriting Tips... You Hack blog and expanded it into Screenwriting Tips, You Hack: 150 Practical Pointers for Becoming a Better Screenwriter. It contains "bite-sized chapters full of funny, insightful, usable advice". According to the publisher, it demonstrates "the differences between film and television structure, how to force yourself to write when youreallydon't want to, and why you probably shouldn't base your first spec script around an alien invasion."
Awards and honors
Xander Bennett won The West AustralianYoung Writer of the Year award in 1999. He was awarded the Queensland New Filmmakers Award - Most Original Script in 2010.
Publications
Bennett, Xander and Cook, Melanie. Cages. Edinburgh: Insomnia Publications, 2009.
Bennett, Xander. Screenwriting tips, you hack: 150 practical pointers for becoming a better screenwriter. Oxford: Elsevier Inc, 2011. ISBN
