I've spent the past few months reading ... well, actually gulping and devouring ... books about screenwriting. Having begun work on a couple of screenplays, I became fascinated with the aspects of the art and the advice from those in the business. Here's the list of the most impressive books on the subject:
- Story, by Robert McKee
- The Screenwriter's Bible, by David Trottier
- 500 Ways to Beat the Hollywood Script Reader, by Jennifer Lerch
- The Writer's Journey, by Christopher Vogler
- How NOT to Write a Screenplay, by Denny Martin Flinn
Playwriting Compared With Screenwriting
There are some things that both genres have strongly in common.
Story, Content, and Characters - The basics. What is the story about? Who is the story about? What is the theme of your script? It is these basics that the above books cover so well and in much more detail than many playwriting books do. Too often, writers have vivid scenes in mind, character traits that are interesting, and have a series of events that happen. But that doesn't always add up to an interesting story. These books address ways and means of creating the kind of story that keeps the readers turning the pages to find out what happens next.
Structure - While Aristotle's six elements of drama (Theme, Plot, Character, Dialogue, Music, and Spectacle) help writers to create their plays, they don't really address how to structure the story. However, the books above do. Particularly, in Story, McKee speaks of the Inciting Incident, the Plot Complications, the Crisis, the Climax, and the Resolution. In The Screenwriter's Bible, Trottier describes the Catalyst, the Big Event, the Pinch, the Crisis, the Showdown, and the Realization. Vogler's The Writer's Journey, based on the works of Joseph Campbell, integrate the millennia of myths told through countless generations of human history, and uses a structure of Call to Adventure; Refusal of the Call; Meeting with the Mentor; Crossing the First Threshold; Tests, Allies, Enemies; Approach to the Inmost Cave; Ordeal; Reward; The Road Back; Resurrection; and Return with the Elixir. All use many examples from classic motion pictures to illustrate how such structures are implemented.
Researching story and structure will bring instant awareness of formerly unknown or unused playwriting elements.
Cliches are a bane to any writing. They speak of laziness and lack of imagination. To see some of the most blatant uses, check out Movie Cliches and Movie Mistakes.
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