Writing in Pictures: Screenwriting Made (Mostly) Painless

by Joseph McBride

Writing in Pictures is a refreshingly practical and entertaining guide to screenwriting that provides what is lacking in most such books: a clear, step-by-step demonstration of how to write a screenplay.

Seasoned screenwriter and writing teacher Joseph McBride breaks down the process into a series of easy, approachable tasks, focusing on literary adaptation as the best way to learn the basics and avoiding the usual formulaic approach. With its wealth of useful tips, along with colorful insights from master screenwriters past and present, this book is invaluable for anyone who wants to learn the craft of screen storytelling.

CONTENTS

Introduction: Who Needs Another Book on Screenwriting?

Part I: Storytelling
1: So Why Write Screenplays?
2: What Is Screenwriting?
3: Stories: What They Are and How to Find Them
4: Ten Tips for the Road Ahead

Part II: Adaptation
5: Breaking the Back of the Book: or, The Art of Adaptation
STEP 1: THE STORY OUTLINE
6: Research and Development
STEP 2: THE ADAPTATION OUTLINE
7: The Elements of Screenwriting
STEP 3: THE CHARACTER BIOGRAPHY
8: Exploring Your Story and How to Tell It
STEP 4: THE TREATMENT

Part III: Production
9: Who Needs Formatting?
10: Actors Are Your Medium
11: Dialogue as Action
STEP 5: THE STEP OUTLINE
12: The Final Script
13: Epilogue: Breaking into Professional Filmmaking

Appendix A: The Basic Steps in the Screenwriting Process
Appendix B: "To Build A Fire" by Jack London
Selected Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index

Genres: Writing, Nonfiction, Film, Education

384 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[Wendy Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite a good book. Not one of my favourite. It's a bit wordy and long winded, but had some good advice scattered liberally within.

[Trav S.D. · Rating 4 out of 5]

As will come as no surprise to those who know me even a little bit, in my youth I was never more inwardly arrogant than when sitting in a playwriting or screenwriting class. In theatre and film school I had several, and my attitude was always one of "Show me!" and "What have I got to learn from you, ya hack?" And then there's always "If you're so brilliant, how come you're teaching this course, huh?".

The truth is, I'm not real interested in the opinions of people who don't impress me (why would I be?). The schmoes who typically resort to teaching (or cranking out "how to" books) seem scarcely a length ahead of me in this horse race, and I'm way in the back! And anyway I don't want to be just "a playwright". What's the point of that? I am in pursuit of the highest reaches of excellence, and that requires inspiration. I don't want to be taught screenwriting by the guy who wrote the TV movie about alcoholism. I want to be taught by Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder or Ben Hecht. (Or the modern equivalents: the Coen Brothers? Charlie Kaufman?) Instead, screenwriting class was always a lot of embarrassing anecdotes from sad sacks, e.g., "Always keep your pot of hot coffee real close to the typewriter!"

"Coffee pot? Typewriter???  Sheeeuuut."

It's been a while since I've sat in a classroom, so over the past several years I've reserved my sullen expressions and my eye-rolling for screenwriting books. Believe me, I've gone through them all, and they have all been pretty terrible. Unreadable, in fact. One skims them for information since they are written so poorly, but since they are written so poorly, why trust the information? If you can't write a good book, I doubt you can write a good screenplay, and if you can't write a good screenplay, what precisely do you have to teach me? And clearly the person has written this book because he or she has not sold scripts. (The exception would be William Goldman who published his wisdom on the subject, but he never clicked for me either).

And I need it to click for me. Thus far, it hasn't quite. Many are the stabs I have taken at professional screen and television writing, and to date I have not found  myself crossing the line I want to cross, the line where I cease to be a playwright thinking first in dialogue and then trying to dream up pictures as an afterthought.....and become a screenwriter who can think and write in pictures. I am no stranger to pictures. I have taken art classes, can draw, love museums, and watch silent movies all the time. STILL, the pictures always end up taking a back seat for me. Can't get my head around it. Thus, this quest for the key.

Joseph McBride's Writing in Pictures: Screenwriting Made (Mostly) Painless (pub date today) is the first book I have ever read that actually feels like it may do it for me.

First of all, the guy automatically has my respect. Among (many) other things, he wrote a terrific biography of John Ford which I had (coincidentally) read a year or two ago, as well as great books on Capra and Welles, and the seminal Hawks on Hawks. While his own artistic fame doesn't stretch much beyond the screenplay for Rock and Roll High School and the short story that became Prom Night, he has that Bogdanovich-like insider knowledge of Hollywood cinema. He knows Hollywood movies inside and out, has sat at the feet of masters (and even acted in Orson Welles ill-fated The Other Side of the Wind). 

More than this, this is the first book on screenwriting I've encountered that is genuinely pleasurable to read. You know what that means? It means that one is induced to actually read it, thereby profiting from the wisdom of his experience, as well as that of the successful colleagues he interviews, and the past masters he has researched. He has a brain in his head and respects the cinema as an art form. He is not shy about citing (for example) Jean Renoir, but he is also very on top of what the industry is seeking right now, so the book has some very useful tips on mechanics.

And as rich and rewarding as it is to read, it's above all a practical manual, taking you step-by-step through an assignment. McBride recommends making your first screenplay an adaptation of an existing work of literature so that you grapple with the difficult demands of screenplay form -- which are hard enough -- without getting too distracted by also having to invent your own plot and characters from scratch on top of it. Along the way, you watch him do his own adaptation of a very disturbing Jack London story about a guy who freezes to death.

In short, the book's got me fired up, and I am going to try out his prescriptions, once I'm done with the book and the play that are next in the pipeline. I already have my work of literature to adapt all picked out! Anyone want to join me? Writing in Pictures is available here.

 

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

Damn. I tried using the html markup for this site. And it looks like crap. Back to plain markdown.

> Julian Hoxter, screenwriter and author of Write What You Don't Know: An Accessible Manual for Screenwriters

> The audacity and ambition of the film, and the fact that its maker was only twenty-five, literally changed my life.

Wells was 25?

When did he start?

> I hauled my portable manual typewriter to the Historical Society reading room to type an exact copy of that magnificent screenplay, since I couldn't afford to have it photocopied.

The value of this man.

> So I served a ten-year apprenticeship teaching myself how to write scripts before I became a professional.

...serving under an amateur master that taught him all the mistakes he knows.

> Trying to earn a living as a screenwriter, or as a writer of any kind, often resembles the Myth of Sisyphus.

Oh, financial advice as well. This guy keeps on giving.

> If you want to be a doctor, you go to medical school. You take a series of clearly defined courses, get the required practical experience, and emerge as an M.D.

So much for this guy's creativity. If he could he would have been a doctor himself, but English was the only choice to make mommy proud, besides working on a construction site.

> People joke about how the guy bagging groceries at the local Ralphs always has a script in his back pocket to sell you, but the joke often turns out to be true.

10% in, and not a word about the subject of the book, but I am already knee deep in his laments regarding the cruel life of the writer.

> So when you tell someone in Hollywood that you're a writer, you are often met with a sneer of contempt.

This guy can get his head out of his ass. Because actors are acclaimed from the day they get off the bus.

> When I first started teaching screenwriting, I found to my surprise that some students seemed unfamiliar with the concept of stories.

Lazy bums, those students should know all he has to teach, and still pay full tuition, he is a busy man.

> The fragmentation of the TV-watching experience, the influence of the Internet and YouTube, and the effect of our amped-up video culture on feature filmmaking have resulted in a style of modern filmmaking relying more on moment-by-moment sensation than on the traditional pleasures of coherent storytelling.

Because poor, illiterate folk in the 18th century were writing divine structure.

> The Internet is changing modes of storytelling

It's that "Internet" produced the new generation of stories now in streaming, and not the old white farts producing the same formulaic crap. It is not 5 studios and their vendors that pushed the envelope.

> So, then, in our modern application of Aristotle to filmmaking, what constitutes a story?

Modern stuff. No wonder this guy got some nominations out of putty and quickly got out while ahead.

> Fuller is roused to reply:
>
> "A film is like a battleground. It's love---hate---action---violence---death. In one word, emotions."

There are some parts that are not crap, but they are far apart. And the noise to sound ratio is quite high. The book is useless, unless this is the only book on the subject you have access on your deserted island.

> "ACTION IS CHARACTER," F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his working notes for his novel about Hollywood, The Last Tycoon.

> Frank Capra once said

And nothing of what this two but writer says. Maybe because there is nothing beyond his name dropping

[Mark Rance · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not a book of rules, as too many books on screenwriting are, no 90-page three-act structure, no twenty-six steps. This is a helping hand, part technical manual (how to format a script and why it’s done that way), part guide book to process with suggestions about how to organize your work (from idea and concept to character bio and research to treatment to outline to finished draft) and part film history class illustrated with interviews (mostly done by McBride, one of out best film historians, himself) with the likes of Billy Wilder, Orson Welles and Howard Hawks. It is also part memoir and part distillation of the author’s screenwriting class lessons and notes.

In short, this book has its feet on the ground and I can’t think of a better companion to take along on that next project if just to have friendly reminders in my ear to keep me on track.

[Hugh · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good and informative look into how to write a screenplay. McBride has a very realistic view on the film industry and on writing careers and this book almost does a better job discouraging writers than it does motivating them. He had a lot of wise points about the process and craft of screenplays but he also liked to repeat himself on many of those points. Nevertheless, this is a book written by an authority on the topic and was a different type of reading experience for me.
McBride gives a step by step guide on how to adapt a work into a screenplay and gives tips on formatting and dialogue. I recommend this to anyone who dreams of being a screenwriter or part of the film industry.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this years ago, but reread it today to pull out some ideas for a film studies group I'm co-leading. Most screenwriting books are mostly the same. The better ones have real world examples from the author's own work, not just snippets from Wells, Ford, Spielberg, etc. This on has those, of course, but also a solid example of the steps he used in the writing of a short based on London's "To Build A Fire," a classic first film script.
I'll pull some scene clips from some of the films he mentions and show them to the group, so this was a useful reread.

[Jud Barry · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you've ever been curious about what's involved in writing a screenplay--even if you're not interested in actually writing one--this would be an excellent book to read (it'd be even more useful if you are interested in actually writing one).

The necessary style-sheet mechanics are here, e.g., the script "should be bound between separate lightweight cardboard covers (front and back); the covers can be any color as long as they are a single color." This bogs things down somewhat, as does the seeing of a single story (Jack London's "To Build a Fire") through all the illustrative iterations from outline through final script.

But these are unavoidable in a how-to book like this one, and of course they're enormously useful to anyone who is more a user than a reader (like me) of this book. Fortunately for the common reader, McBride spends a lot of time talking about the process by which a story becomes a movie. There's a chapter called "Breaking the Back of the Book; or, The Art of Adaptation" that anyone would enjoy who's ever complained about how a movie has ruined a book because it gives a lively, anecdote-rich account of how the process of adaptation frequently requires "destroying the original in order to save it." The story-telling properties of film and those of written prose are different; to go from one to the other involves what McBride calls "reimagination."

Another aspect of the book that I enjoyed was the perhaps-unintentionally humorous portrayal of Hollywood as a place built on the expectation of, ahem, stolen ideas. (The librarian in me wants to go off on a tangent about the irony of Disney, Inc., borrowing fairy tales only to slap copyrights on them.) Some of the funniest pages to me as a denizen of the real (non-Hollywood) world have to do with the pitching process and how to avoid having your staggering-genius idea ripped off (hint: it involves writing down what transpired at the "pitch," mailing this account to yourself, and not opening it).

So like I have this great idea for a movie about this guy who has a great idea for a movie and who pitches it but doesn't register it with the Writers Guild and so it gets ripped off and turned into a blockbuster, which makes the guy turn into Rambo bin Laden. Go ahead. Make my day!

[Terri Lynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me a while because I kept using the book as a reference. This is an excellent method for writing screenplays from someone who does it for a living. He made everything crystal clear and shows you step=by-step how to succeed.

[Sarah Yasin · Rating 2 out of 5]

a cautious approach to the craft.

[Andie Long · Rating 5 out of 5]

I reserve the right to change my star rating if my essay flops hahaha

[Marga Britto · Rating 5 out of 5]

From the myriad of books of screenwriting available, this is by far one of the best.

[Marjo · Rating 3 out of 5]

An all right book, I expected more practical advice, but the anecdotes were amusing.

[Tasha]

Had to return it to the library before I could finish. Whomp-whomp.