Will Dee

Unlike most screenwriting books, this one doesn’t delve into formatting a script or selling a screenplay. Instead it gets deeply and thoroughly into the nuts and bolts of critical topics like storytelling, theme, and character development.

I particularly like his practical suggestions for using Polti’s 36 dramatic situations and the enneagram as brainstorming tools. I’ve seen books on those things before but needed more information on the practical application of such tools, and this book is it. As one who writes short stories and novel-length fiction, this book has really helped me plow past some writer’s block and take a hard look at my characters.

I can see using this book again and again, especially during National Novel Writing Month when I’m the most starved for a fresh idea.

Rating: 5 / 5

Writing a Great Movie: Key Tools for Successful Screenwriting

No one can teach you how to write. Jeff Kitchen can teach you how to make what you write better. This book offers a wide range of dramatic tools to develop a winning premise into a fully realized script and take an existing script to the next level. Most books on screenwriting suggest “this is where you should…”. And indeed it should be there, but I want to know how to do it with with my story? Jeff not only shows you where to go, he gives you several ways to get there. His explanation of central dilemma is worth the meager $13.57 asking price. Do yourself a favor buy this book (I did and the response to my screenplay has gone from “good” to “I couldn’t put it down”).

Rating: 5 / 5

Writing a Great Movie: Key Tools for Successful Screenwriting

There is a multitude of books that have recently become standard over the last twenty to thirty years regarding the mastery of screenwriting. Viki King’s book “How to write a Movie in 21 days” is probably one of the most well known, as is “Screenplay” by Syd Field.

I think the truth about a lot of these books is that most people are looking for small, concise manuals that are easy to read and easy to cull the real gems from. From the way I’ve seen a lot of people approach screenwriting, most of it is typically haphazard. The bulk of people read bits and pieces of books and rarely ever any one book from cover to cover. If you can imagine a person shaking a book above their head hoping for gold coins, diamonds, rubies and other riches to fall from the pages then you have the correct visual. It’s a classic blunder, but one that more often than not is the result of too much television advertising and not taking one’s dream serious enough.

Jeff Kitchen’s “Writing a Great Movie”, is a rare book that most people can, and should read from cover to cover at least once. If you read it twice, then you’ll be ahead of the curve. It’s most likely the best book on writing I’ve seen bar none, and not just on screenwriting either. Using a system of `comparison and contrast’ with different films like Blade Runner, Training Day, Tootsie, Minority Report and The Godfather to illustrate the strengths, the thread and the blood of good writing. Kitchen shows you many, many times over how a good story builds up on itself and how to successfully break it down to properly understand it, and how to identify the most integral aspects of it and use them all as tools.

I’ve been writing novels for about fifteen years and my approach to writing has changed drastically now and I couldn’t imagine going back and abandoning what I’ve learned from this incredibly helpful book. Some of the help and advice is complex, like the information about Enneagrams and the Enneagram Institute, which sounds daunting and pedantic and like someone trying to cloak Scientology and Dianetics within a screenwriting manual, which is not the case at all. The information about the Enneagram does pop up in Scientology and does get a mention in Dianetics, but for the record was around a lot longer than the usage made of it by Scientology. It’s good information and not something to skip past. You’ll find this in Chapter 4, so don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Other information and advice is simple and easy to grasp and stuff that all writing teachers should tell their students, but probably do not. Another point is the use of index-cards to outline and detail your story, which works for both Screenplay and Novel formats and is a brilliant idea that gets good discussion and was something that many great writers have often used themselves.

As a historical note, and something not covered in the book, Nabakov outlined everything he did on Index cards, quite extensively, and is a resource that scholars of his work have to glean and sift through to this day.

Kitchen tells the reader to make good use of quotes, biblical passages, idioms, etc. as themes within your story which will give it heart. The information in the book is inexhaustible and worthy on many levels. He also uses every piece of advice he gives, to bring it back to the films mentioned above and is quite original in doing so, and a very original way to teach.

If you’re looking for “the” book on screenwriting, or writing in general, this book will take your efforts from the amateur realms, and launch it into the next level and bolster a real sense of skill and professionalism that it may have been lacking.

This book is worthy of much recommendation.

Rating: 5 / 5

Writing a Great Movie: Key Tools for Successful Screenwriting