The Pros and Cons of Screenwriting Books
By landencelano | February 10, 2012
When I first decided to dedicate myself fully to screenwriting, the first action I took was to investigate the most popular books on the subject. There were a few that I already owned, but hadn’t read. (They were mostly to make my bookshelf look more impressive.) Robert McKee, Syd Field, Blake Snyder, and Christopher Vogler were all at the top of the list, and so I set out to learn what I could from these “gurus.”
After I began reading these books, I immediately began to realize problems that plagued every script I had written up to that point. Passive characters, ill-defined dramatic needs, sloppy and/or rushed plots riddled my stories. I felt ashamed, embarrassed, and frustrated, but these books provided me with a ray of hope.
TIME CUT TO: Months later…
I’ve read Mr. McKee’s book “Story,” and multiple volumes by Syd Field and Blake Snyder, and I, like so many other screenwriters, still found myself frustrated with my script. It wasn’t fitting the damn formula! How is this story ever going to work if I can’t get the “catalyst” to occur on page 20?
There is something to be said for these “guru” books, so long as the reader doesn’t take their preachings as gospel. I had a very difficult experience with Blake Snyder’s “Save the Cat!” books, which ended up immersing me so deeply into my head in trying to construct a story so point-by-point that I could have done a connect-the-dots with my index cards. But a connect-the-dots portrait of a woman looks nothing like a Picasso woman, or a Da Vinci, or a Vermeer. It’s going to be a drawing of a thin-line connecting obvious points made to look like a woman. It’ll hang on your parent’s fridge, not in the Louvre.
Do you like that metaphor? Syd Field uses them quite often.
But there is a lot of use for screenwriting books. What I have found, perhaps, the most helpful is that they present ideas that you should keep in mind while writing your script and developing your characters. The redundancy and use of multiple metaphors tends to bludgeon readers with the importance of these things, but for someone like me who has to read something two or three times before it sinks in, it is actually helpful. But the danger comes from believing these “guidelines” to be “rules.”
Personally, I’ve found a lot of use in Syd Field’s “Screenplay”, and particularly in his “Workbook,” but this has little to do with his mantra and more to do with the fact that it is a process I can follow to force me to write every day and think about the different aspects of story. For instance, I found less help in applying his “Circle of Being” theory than in simply taking the time to write and understand character backstories.
Robert McKee’s “Story” is another book that I initially took a lot from, but have since let most of it slip away. Being a writer who really had no clue what I was doing, it wasn’t necessarily McKee’s teachings that were eye-opening as much as it was someone [read: anyone] talking about story in a way that I hadn’t yet thought of it.
I am now of the perspective that these books are pretty arbitrary, and that the only education you’ll need to survive is to watch and study films and read scripts. (It’s not enough to just put in a movie and surf the internet on your iPhone during its lulls and say you’ve studied it – something I myself am guilty of from time to time.) Watch the first twenty minutes of a film you find interesting. Watch it again. And again. Read the script up until that point. Watch the first twenty minutes while reading along in the script. Read the various versions of the script. Take notes!
This is the recommendation of most working screenwriters. I agree with it wholeheartedly, but I do think it’s a bit simplified advice. After all, I can look at the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright all day long, but without someone to tell me what the hell “organic architecture” and “being in harmony with humanity” mean, I’m just going to see a pretty house. (There’s another Syd Field metaphor for you.) So without someone blatantly laying out what “dramatic structure” is, and how to look for it, I could watch hundreds of movies and read hundreds of scripts without getting as much out of it as I could otherwise be.
The most important thing to keep in mind is that there is no simple and clear-cut answer to great screenwriting. No single book or method is going to unlock a magic door inside of you that will unleash superhuman screenwriting powers. We all wish [read: think] there is, but there isn’t. So go ahead and read any or all of these books, but know you’re probably going to immediately fail, and that failing is okay; failing is normal; failing is progress. Getting it right the first time exists only in the realm of the screenwriter superhero.
Embrace your journey of learning to write as if it were a script someone else were writing. It wouldn’t be a very interesting story if you achieved your goal in the first act, would it? Stick with your dramatic need to learn to write, expect obstacles, and hopefully you’ll achieve your goal or learn what it is that you really want. Of course, I say this didactic mumbo-jumbo more as a reminder to myself than to anyone else…