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Stuck!: Learn to Love Your Screenplay Again
Maybe you have a great idea for a movie, and you’re thinking to yourself, “Man, if I only knew how to write a screenplay.” Maybe you’ve started your screenplay already, but you get to a certain point where you JUST DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO NEXT! Or maybe you’ve already finished your screenplay, read it over again, hated it, and smashed your hard drive, frustrated. Don’t give up on your dreams just yet—not until you’ve read this book. Over the course of his successful career as a writer and producer, Josh Miller has learned plenty about the craft and art of screenwriting. There are no fancy tricks or shortcuts to making a great screenplay, just time-honored techniques, fundamental story elements, and one secret you. Josh will show you how to create a compelling story and deploy advanced screenwriting techniques, but most importantly, he’ll teach you how to harness your unique voice, experience, and perspective to emotionally connect with audiences and give your screenplay real substance. Get this book—and get yourself unstuck.
288 pages, Paperback
Published April 22, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 14, 2019
If you are looking for a book on the fundamentals of screenwriting, maybe this is an adequate choice, and you should ignore this review; if however, you are intrigued by the cover's promise ("learn to love your screenplay again"), don't bother, unless the reason you're stuck is because, somehow, you never considered using a 3-act dramatic structure. The author mentions how an audience can react negatively to mixed tone in a script, yet this is the same as the disconnect between the book's promise and its contents.
I'm trying not to be too critical to a book that I was only tangentially interested in (I'm not interested in screenwriting, but narrative in other media, and I thought the title premise could have applications to a lot of areas I work in: how do you find the joy in a creative project that's lost its spark?), but the tone feels a little condescending, particularly considering the author urges the reader to be prolific (good advice), when there's little evidence that the author himself is prolific (going on imdb writing credits, which seems like a reasonable metric here, particularly given the passing disses of arthouse cinema throughout and emphasis on mainstream appeal).
The core idea is that by revisiting the fundamentals, analyzing your work-in-progress in terms of archetypes and well-understood patterns, that you'll be able to make progress. Maybe that's true in some cases, but as a cure-all, I don't buy it. Particularly, to fulfill the promise of the premise, it would have been more interesting to have a solutions-oriented approach, like "if the structure doesn't seem well-motivated, try thinking through the story from the antagonist's point of view", instead you're largely left to review the basics by yourself. (With plenty of references to examples in the medium, whose study alone is surely more useful than any book.)
I'm trying not to be too critical to a book that I was only tangentially interested in (I'm not interested in screenwriting, but narrative in other media, and I thought the title premise could have applications to a lot of areas I work in: how do you find the joy in a creative project that's lost its spark?), but the tone feels a little condescending, particularly considering the author urges the reader to be prolific (good advice), when there's little evidence that the author himself is prolific (going on imdb writing credits, which seems like a reasonable metric here, particularly given the passing disses of arthouse cinema throughout and emphasis on mainstream appeal).
The core idea is that by revisiting the fundamentals, analyzing your work-in-progress in terms of archetypes and well-understood patterns, that you'll be able to make progress. Maybe that's true in some cases, but as a cure-all, I don't buy it. Particularly, to fulfill the promise of the premise, it would have been more interesting to have a solutions-oriented approach, like "if the structure doesn't seem well-motivated, try thinking through the story from the antagonist's point of view", instead you're largely left to review the basics by yourself. (With plenty of references to examples in the medium, whose study alone is surely more useful than any book.)
July 7, 2019
The screenwriting advice found in this book is fine; nothing revelatory. Where this book really looses points for me is that no one bothered to check to see if the plot descriptions for the film or the actors identified in the descriptions were correct. A simple read of a wikipedia plot synopsis for most of these films would tell you who plays who and what happens to their character.
June 20, 2019
Great book. I went in not knowing what to expect, but came out with knowledge that I'm sure will come in handy for years to come. Thanks Josh!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews