LEARN THE ART OF SCREENWRITING
Discover the art of screenwriting with our curated book list, featuring essential guides like *The Screenwriter's Bible* by David Trottier and Aristotle's timeless *Poetics*. From crafting compelling characters to building story ideas, these must-reads—including works by Jack Heffron—offer expert techniques for novice and seasoned writers. Unlock your storytelling potential and master the craft with these top resources in film and narrative structure.
Book
The Screenwriter's Bible
by David Trottier
Trottier, a script consultant, writer, producer and instructor, describes this resource as six self-contained books in one. They cover screenwriting essentials, an overview of the writing process, formatting standards, speculative scripts, marketing, and a compilation of resources. The resources include addresses and contacts for industry organizations, guilds, schools, publications, support groups and contests.
Book
The Writer's Idea Book
by Jack Heffron
"Where do you get your ideas?" &break;&break;It's a question and a quandary that bedevils every writer. And once you've got an idea, what then? Ideas without a plan, without a purpose, are no more than pleasant thoughts. &break;&break;In The Writer's Idea Book, Jack Heffron, former senior editor at Writer's Digest Books and Story Press, will help you find the answer. Utilizing over 400 prompts and exercises, you'll generate intriguing ideas and plumb their possibilities to turn them into something amazing. &break;&break;The Writer's Idea Book will give you the insight and the self-awareness to create and refine ideas that demand to be transformed into greater works, the kind of compelling, absorbing writing that will have other writers asking "where do you get those ideas?"
Book
The Writer's Idea Workshop
by Jack Heffron
This volume draws on the success of its idea generating predecessor "The Writer's Idea Book" and takes readers to the next step--assessing their ideas and growing them into finished pieces.
Book
Aristotle's Poetics
by Aristotle
Introduced by Francis Fergusson, the Poetics, written in the fourth century B.C., is still an essential study of the art of drama, indeed the most fundamental one we have. It has been used by both playwrights and theorists of many periods, and interpreted, in the course of its two thousand years of life, in various ways. The literature which has accumulated around it is, as Mr. Fergusson points out, "full of disputes so erudite that the nonspecialist can only look on in respectful silence." But the Poetics itself is still with us, in all its suggestiveness, for the modern reader to make use of in his turn and for his own purposes. Francis Fergusson's lucid, informative, and entertaining Introduction will prove invaluable to anyone who wishes to understand and appreciate the Poetics. Using Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, as Aristotle did, to illustrate his analysis, Mr. Fergusson pints out that Aristotle did not lay down strict rules, as is often thought: "The Poetics," he says, "is much more like a cookbook than it is like a textbook of elementary engineering." Read in this way, it is an essential guide not only to Sophoclean tragedy, but to the work of so modern a playwright as Bertolt Brecht, who considered his own "epic drama" the first non-Aristotelian form.
Book
The Writer’s Digest Sourcebook for Building Believable Characters
by Marc McCutcheon
Six novelists reveal their approaches to characterization in this guide, which comes with a questionnaire to help writers probe their characters' backgrounds, beliefs, and desires and a "thesaurus" of physical and psychological traits to aid in character development.
