Want to Write Your Own Screenplay?

First buy a book . . .

It’s awards season, the time when people all across our great country are thinking, “I could write a better screenplay than THAT.”  In an incredible show of goodguyship, my husband Rob took a break  from writing episodes of “The Simpsons” to read and review some of the top screenwriting how-to guides for those who want to plunge in.  The rest of this post is all him:

Aspiring novelists who walk the fiction aisles at the bookstore wonder how it must feel to finally have a book published after years of hard work, and then they all have the same thought:  maybe I should just write a screenplay.  Movie scripts are a lot shorter, pay a LOT better than novels, and if you do sell one, you’ll have time and money to write your novel, for which, of course, you’ll write the screenplay.  Or maybe you should just write the screenplay first.

The problem is, how do you go about writing a script?  Might there possibly be a book out there that tells you in insufferable detail how to go about the process?  Actually, there are several hundred of those–leading to the thought that maybe the aspiring writer should skip both the novel and the screenplay and go right to publishing his own writing guide.

Anyway,  Claire and Kim asked me to come up with a list of the best screenwriting how-to books, but after agreeing, I realized that I haven’t bought one of these books in years.

So I headed over to The Writer’s Store in Los Angeles.  I spoke with Anthony, one of their extremely knowledgeable salesmen, and asked him to name their top-selling screenwriting book.  He immediately said, “Save the Cat” and pointed to a big empty space on the shelves where it sits when it’s not sold out.  I bought several others he recommended, found my old favorites, and borrowed Save the Cat from a friend, knowing full well that just because it was the flavor-of-the-month didn’t mean it belonged on my list.  From those choices I compiled my top-five list of screenwriting books:

1. Save the Cat, by Blake Snyder. If your goal is to write a marketable movie script, this is the book to buy.  Snyder is one of the few guys to write a screenwriting guide who has actually sold a bunch of scripts (and had a couple made).  His tastes are grossly commercial (he turns up his nose at the film Memento, choosing instead to give a structural analysis of the Sandra Bullock movie Miss Congeniality), but he has good advice on every page.  He breaks your unwritten movie down into fifteen parts, even telling you what page things need to happen on — “Catalyst, p. 12.”  “Bad guys close in:  pp. 55-75.”  While he backs up his theories with lots of examples from movies (including a few too many from his own scripts), Snyder follows a rule that the other authors on this list have forgotten:  keep it entertaining and short.
2. Writing for Emotional Impact, by Karl Iglesias.  Iglesias begins his book,  “There are three kinds of feelings when reading a story – boredom, interest, and WOW!”  (When I read this to my friend Joel Cohen, he said, “What about, ‘WOW, this is boring’?”)  You’d be forgiven for closing the book after this opening, but it is worth forging ahead.  The book is filled with good lessons, especially when it sticks to its theme.  In fact, I’d say it’s too filled with good advice:  if you were to read the whole book, I think the appropriate response would be to feel overwhelmed by the writing task ahead of you, drink yourself into a stupor, and not start a screenplay.  At least, that’s what I did.  But you should buy it.
3. Screenplay:  the Foundations of Screenwriting, by Syd Field.  This is the granddaddy of script writing books, published first in 1979, and a generation of movie and TV writers made fun of it, while at the same time following everything Syd told them to do.  Screenplay was a break-through book that laid out the three-act structure of the screenplay, and explained, in a somewhat hectoring tone, what should happen in each act.  And if you love the movie Chinatown, this is the book for you, because Syd loves Chinatown much more than you do.
4. Making a Good Script Great, by Linda Seger.  Another book getting a little long in the tooth, but if you’ve already written a script and are stumped about ways to improve it, there are helpful ideas in here, from re-structuring, to re-envisioning character.
5. The Screenwriter’s Bible, by David Trottier.  This makes the list mostly because it has an excellent section on how to format your script.  Even if you’re using screenwriting software like Final Draft, you’re still going to have lots of questions, such as when to use ANGLE ON and when to use REACTION SHOT.  Trottier has a pretty complete set of instructions.

I also have to recommend William Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade, which is not technically a screenwriting book, but which still has insightful advice within it, amidst great stories about the business.

And for general books about the writing process, my personal favorites are Stephen King’s On Writing and Stephen Pressfield’s The War of Art, which I think has the best advice of all for how to write a screenplay:  tell your inner demons to shut up, then get up off your ass and write.