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: Read the rest of this entry »
Claire
Kim
