Your Screenplay Sucks: 100 Ways to Make It Great by Akers William M

Author:Akers, William M. [Akers, William M.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781932907452
Publisher: Michael Wiese Productions
Published: 2008-07-31T16:00:00+00:00

Welcome

to Writing

48. You aren’t educated in your chosen storytelling medium!

How are you going to figure out this most bizarre of writing forms if you’re not reading lots and lots and lots of screenplays? Are you nuts?

Do you go to movies?

Do you rent movies?

Do you read screenplays? Do you read?

Aw, come on!

You have no doubt taken writing classes. Or more fancypants: Creative Writing. You know, by now, having done it since the third grade, how to write a short story. Or a novel, or a business letter, or a dazzlingly wicked Email. But, if you’ve bought this book, you are not a big time screenwriter, and you had better be reading all kinds of screenplays, all the time.

No successful writer got where they are without reading all the time. If you spend half your writing time reading and half writing, you’re moving forward faster than the writer who only works on her own stuff.

You learn more. You get out of your head. You see what other people have done when faced with the same problems.

When I started to write, the only book I could find with pages that looked like screenplay pages was Five Screenplays by Preston

Sturges. It’s still on my bookshelf, right in arm’s reach. The fact that they were written before 1950 didn’t affect the format. It’s still the same.

I invoke the amazing www.script-o-rama.com. Go there and rejoice! Read a script every day. Pretend you’re a development person. Read three scripts a day! Pretend you’re Johnny Depp. Only read scripts with offers attached.

But read scripts. Bookstores and libraries have them. I’m a big fan of libraries because they are free. And, if they’re free, you’ll read more screenplays. The more you read, the better a writer you will be.

Read, read, read.

However, there’s a good chance your screenplay will suck — if all you read is screenplays! Don’t you dare say, “I’m a screenwriter, dude. I’m not interested in writing a novel.”

Read it all. Read EVERYTHING you can get your hands on. Scripts. Plays. Blogs. Journalism. Short stories. Comic strips. Comic books. Fiction. Non fiction. Memoirs. Backs of cereal boxes. Books by guys who didn’t write in English. The articles in Playboy, ha ha ha. Books by dead men. Books by dead women. Anything that’s good. Anything. It will help you like you won’t believe.

If you read Thomas McGuane, it will help you understand something about your own writing… even if you’re not writing about a rancher in Montana. Dickens can teach you a ton about comedy. Shakespeare’s good.

So are these writers: Suzanne Kingsbury, Terry Kay, David McCullough, Nadine Gordimer, Joyce Carol Oates, James Jones, George V. Higgins, Bruce Feiler, Ernest Hemingway, Irwin Shaw, Zadie Smith, Camille Paglia, Guy de Maupassant, Jane Austen, Anton Chekov, Edgar Allan Poe, Tobias Wolff, Anne Tyler, Lee Smith, Roald Dahl, Jack London, A.S. Byatt, Jesse Hill Ford, Calvin Trillin, Donald Bartheleme, Jim Thompson, Flannery O’Connor, Elmore Leonard, Isabel Allende, Carl Hiaasen, Patricia Highsmith, Jamaica Kinkaid, Jay McInerney, Richard Ford, Jeffrey Lent, Tim Gautreaux, and on and on…

Ask your friends to tell you names of the best writers they’ve ever read.

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