By Forris Day Jr.
After a screenplay is written it is just a good habit to get other peoples opinion on it. Hint…not your Mom’s…she will love it no matter how good or bad it is. You will want to know if it is an interesting and engaging story. Are the characters likable? Is the dialog written in a fashion that is conversational or at least believable within the structure of the tale? To take it a step further you can hire a professional story analyst to read it over. Sure it may be painful to hear your story needs a bit more development, or your characters aren’t fleshed out enough but these notes are gold and will move your career forward. Your Mom will be even prouder when your script actually becomes a sellable work.
Why not get started on the right foot when creating your script? “The book “Memo From the Story Department” by Christopher Vogler and David McKenna is a valuable resource to help you do just that. Vogler and McKenna are professional story analysts and they share their years of knowledge in this information laden publication. By taking their advice you will be able to get a jump on writing your script in such a way that you will end up with a more sellable story.
An example of the topics covered are story structure, character creation, environments and locations. Some of these things may seem obvious, but many writers may not think to really put thought into the location for instance. The location can really affect your character and these guys really make you focus on that. You wont just be reading the book. You will have homework, or exercises.These aren’t just light little exercises either. You will be reading scripts, creating loglines and writing essays. This is the stuff that people pay thousands of dollars to learn in film school. Nowyou can pick up the info in a book that costs around 20 bucks. Do the work and reap the rewards.
The style of the book makes it fun. Vogler and McKenna trade off writing chapters. At the end of each chapter there is a “Note from…….” section. For example, if Vogler wrote the chapter, it ends with a “Note from McKenna”. These notes are fun and conversational and make you feel like you are sitting in a room with the guys chatting about scriptwriting. Lots of humor in the notes yet loaded with great information. You can tell these guys are friends.
I highly recommend this book to anyone writing a screenplay or planning on writing one. The information contained in the book is valuable and should be referenced whenever you embark on a writing journey. Your screenplay will be written tighter and be more interesting to the reader and ultimately the viewer of your movie if you use the tools that Christopher Vogler and David McKenna share in “Memo From the Story Department”.
Rating: 9/10 – “Learn to write better stories”
Purchase “Memo From the Story Department”
Learn more about Christopher Vogler
Contact David mcKenna
dlmck1@earthlink.net