How to Write a Story...Any Story: The Art of Storytelling : A Directed Approach to Writing Great Fiction

by Michael B. Druxman

Provides lessons and exercises on writing for movies, and includes discussions of character revelations, conflict, plotting, exposition, openings, and endings

Genres: Writing

128 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1997

About the author

Michael B. Druxman, author of ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD: From the Secret Files of Harry Pennypacker, is a veteran Hollywood screenwriter whose credits include CHEYENNE WARRIOR with Kelly Preston, DILLINGER AND CAPONE starring Martin Sheen and F. Murray Abraham, and THE DOORWAY with Roy Scheider, which he also directed.

He is also a prolific playwright. Among his many works is the one-person play, JOLSON, which has had numerous productions around the country.

Additionally, he is the author of over a dozen other published books, including several nonfiction works about Hollywood, its movies, and the people who make them (e.g., BASIL RATHBONE: His Life and His Films, and MAKE IT AGAIN, SAM: A Survey of Movie Remakes), plus two novels, NOBODY DROWNS IN MINERAL LAKE and SHADOW WATCHER and a book of short stories, DRACULA MEETS JACK THE RIPPER & Other Revisionist Histories.

His memoir, MY FORTY-FIVE YEARS IN HOLLYWOOD...AND HOW I ESCAPED ALIVE, was published in 2010.

Mr. Druxman resides in Austin, TX.

Reviews

[Printable Tire]

Well if you want an extremely basic introduction to script writing, I guess you could do a lot worse than this book, with its type-20 font and easy readability. You could probably read it in the span of an hour, and it's full of plenty of filler: pages of examples from the author's unproduced screenplays; dictionary definitions; pages with wide margins and the titles of movies you're supposed to just think about; and one of those extraneous fill-in character charts with attributes like "physical characteristics: neck? hips? Occupation: union? Military service: Union or legion? Taste in Jewelry?" and more hilarious amounts of minutia I probably couldn't even answer about myself.

There's one of those charts that shows the three-act structure:
set-up - catalyst - first turning point - climax - final confrontation - resolution

There's a piece on exposition, where he says it's better to distract from the tedium of exposition with some other action that's going on at the same time.

It ends with his advice on breaking into screenwriting: basically, you need a "motor," somebody of at least minor importance who will get others interested in it. This can be achieved by mailing your script to a minor character on a TV show or movie who is looking for a chance to have a leading role in an envelope marked PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL, PLEASE FORWARD. The author almost got William Conrad of Cannon to start in a one-person Orson Welles play this way but unfortunately Conrad soon went on to star in Jake and the Fatman.

He points out that the way Sidney Poitier solves the crime in In the Heat of the Night makes no sense because a scene was cut out and he also ruins the plots and twists of about a dozen movies I haven't seen.

Well, that's about it: actually, you don't even have to read it anymore. It was worth the .08 (plus the .61 I'll be getting for trading it in to Amazon) I bought it for but certainly not worth its original $11.95 price.

Although this passage was worth all those eight pennies:

"Just recently I was lunching with my agent in a restaurant. I noticed a man sitting behind him. He was probably in his late twenties, and had a jolly, friendly face. He was also fat... so fat that his bare belly burst out from the bottom of his yellow t-shirt and spilled over his belt. [Incidentally, he was an outie.]

The restaurant was doing an "all you can eat" promotion, and this guy was eating barbecue ribs... plat after plate of them. Barbecue sauce covered his chin, and dripped down to stain his shirt. But, he didn't care. He was in food heaven.

I watched with growing fascination as he devoured that meal, totally unaware of the spectacle he was making of himself, and I thought: "This guy is disgustingly beautiful. He'd make a great character for a movie."

I don't know where or in what it's going to be, but somewhere I'm going to use that fat fellow. He has become a member of my mental pool of characters."

PS Abe Vigoda is on the cover

PPS He also coincidentally wrote the script for this horrible softcore movie I was trying to remember the title of recently: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhk-N2.... Pretty amazing coincidence, actually.

[Marcelo Gonzalez · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is some truly gatekeeping, ethnocentric bullshit. It is prescriptive in the most narrow way possible, effectively claiming there is one type of story that works, which may be true of the garbage he wrote that has long since been forgotten, but is certainly not true of every story across every media since the dawn of humanity.

There are many ways to write stories and just as many ways to write about how to write stories, but this isn't one of them.

[Kohl · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don't remember the author's name but he was pretty full of himself. Though this book is supposedly geared to all storytelling, it is actually more for screenwriters. The guy continually uses his own unproduced screenplays as an example of good storytelling. Despite that he did hit on the basic points of a plot but you can learn those in many other, much better books. I read it in two nights so it was no big loss. One star cause the man wrote a book which is one up on me.

- Kohl 08/17/2011