Screenplay: Building Story Through Character

by Jule Selbo

Screenplay: Building Story Through Character is designed to help screenwriters turn simple or intricate ideas into exciting, multidimensional film narratives with fully-realized characters. Based on Jule Selbo’s unique 11-step structure for building story through characters, the book teaches budding screenwriters the skills to focus and shape their ideas, turning them into stories filled with character development, strong plot elements based on obstacles and conflicts, and multifaceted emotional arcs.

Using examples and analysis from classic and contemporary films across a range of genres, from The Godfather to Guardians of the Galaxy, Selbo’s Screenplay takes students inside the scriptwriting process, providing a broad overview for both beginners and seasoned writers alike. The book is rounded out with discussion questions, writing exercises, a guide to the business of screenwriting, in-depth film breakdowns, and a glossary of screenwriting terms.

308 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 24, 2015

About the author

SO EXCITED! 8 DAYS, A Dee Rommel Mystery will be available on December 6, 2023. It's the third in the series. Pre-orders are available now. 9 DAYS, A Dee Rommel Mystery followed 10 DAYS in garnering awards and award nominations and also a STARRED Kirkus Review! Your local bookstores can pre-order it for you too!

Check out this review on GoodReads. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

10 DAYS, A Dee Rommel Mystery was the first in a new crime/mystery series. It got a starred Kirkus Review "nifty, engrossing procedural..." "...punchy, vivid prose..." and went on to win a Silver Falchion Award for Best Investigator Novel, it was nominated for a Maine Literary Award, Clue Award and Foreword Review Award. It's also up for the Best Crime Mystery Book Award on FeedMyReads!

Jule is a novelist, playwright and screenwriter. She has written for television and film for a few decades (check IMDB). She is also a professor at CSU in California, teaching screenwriting and film history - and lectures internationally on story structure and film genre.
She basically loves story - and telling stories and helping others tell their stories.
Her award-winning plays have been done in NYC, Los Angeles and regional theaters across America.
Novels include FIND ME IN FLORENCE (2019), DREAMS OF DISCOVERY, Based on the Life of John Cabot (2018) and the upcoming BREAKING BARRIERS: Laura Bassi and the Enlightenment.
https://www.juleselbo.com

Jule would love to hear from her readers!

Reviews

[Chris Hall · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an updated version of her Gardner book, From Idea to Successful Script, and was suggested to me by me screenwriting teacher. Much of the book is filled with general advice which if, you have read other screenwriting books or have any common sense, will be quite familiar and not that useful. The meat of the book is her 11-step story structure, one of the more useful screenwriting paradigms I've come across, due to its focus on character development and flexibility of how much screen time each stage takes. The latter allows for stories to evolve more organically and avoid the prescriptive "X has to happen on page Y" paradigms which lead to movies that feel very cliched. The book includes many examples of applying her paradigm to well known movies, both recent and classic, which is essential for any good screenwriting book.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

The structure of the book is crap. Chapter 1: Idea vs Story. And Selbo writes for whom the book was written. Weird. Than the text will fluctuate between "story" and "screen story". ?? And that story looks pretty much like the treatment. Anyway, too much slogans and stereotype to be of any relevant help. Use it if it's the only book you have access to.