How to Write a Movie in 21 Days: The Inner Movie Method Author: Visit Amazon's Viki King Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0062730665 | Format: PDF
How to Write a Movie in 21 Days: The Inner Movie Method Description
Amazon.com Review
No book can find your ideas for you, but this one provides a great service in helping you discover and develop a story, and to come up with the completed script. King helps you learn to think cinematically, in the language of the movies, and to keep asking the essential questions as they work: What's the story? Who is the story about? Do you care about the characters? Does anyone? King also tries to help you survive not just the structural pitfalls that can derail a script, but also the mental or emotional whirlpools that can prevent any artist from finishing a project.
Review
"Viki King manages to demystify the art and science of screenwriting. Speaking from the heart and later, spotlighting concepts from the head, Viki King presents tactics that place writing in the unstressed context of nonthreatening time management. The idea of eight, nine and ten minute sessions is wonderfully simple, promisingly adaptive, and joyfully do-able." --
Maisha Hazzard, Ohio University See all Editorial Reviews
- Paperback: 208 pages
- Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers (September 15, 1993)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0062730665
- ISBN-13: 978-0062730664
- Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.6 inches
- Shipping Weight: 5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
...at least not one that's actually sellable, or that has enough depth and craftsmanship to survive in the real-world marketplace. To think otherwise is to be laughably naive. Having said that, I strongly recommend this book!
Why the discrepancy? Simple. I've been writing for years, off and on. I've read dozens of screenwriting books, and taken a few of the big screenwriting courses. I've started writing about 50 screenplays, and completed about 3 of them.
One of the troubles I had (sound familiar?), is that I would begin writing, get about 30 or 40 pages into it, and then stop. Either I went off-course, I began to hate my concept or characters, thought my writing was atrocious, or came up with "a better idea." The result? Dozens of half-completed screenplays.
A writer writes. And writing is re-writing. You'll never fully appreciate these clichés until you ACTUALLY SIT DOWN AND WRITE! And don't stop!
The script I wrote when I actually APPLIED this book (about 2 years after I bought it) was written in about 48 days. Hmmph! But you know what? It was WRITTEN. It was complete. It was my first, fully-completed screenplay. And it was actually pretty darn good.
Truth be told, when you finish writing the script Viki King helps you get out on paper, it will likely be only a FIRST DRAFT. Chances are, there'll be a lot more work to do. Re-writing. Making it more organic. Adding depth and breadth to your characters. Expanding your subplots and building elements necessary to your story that Viki's book overlooks (things experience will teach you). But if you've never written a screenplay before (or never completed one you like), this book will talk you through it.
As a writer, my biggest problem is slowing down to fix what I'm writing before I've finished writing it. It's very easy for me to get so caught up in making something sound perfect that I never get around to finishing the piece--just write it off as another imperfect work-in-progress and go on to something else.
King's approach gets you writing, writing, writing, writing, writing. You don't even think about editing until the whole story has been written down--even if it's written down in a thoroughly unreadable form. Her reasoning? It's easier to make something good from something mediocre (or even bad) than it is to make something good from nothing.
I've written a few screenplays (none sold yet, doggone it), but only one using exactly the plan outlined in this book. I found that, while her method works and works very well, just going through it once showed me where the span of my writing approach needed her kind of support and where it stood firmly on my own abilities.
I continue to use her 8-minute exercises because they are wonderful for getting you writing while preventing you from thinking about writing: if you only have 8 minutes to cover a topic, you'd better get those words onto paper as fast as you can. 8 minutes is the perfect limit because it's enough to get a substantial amount written--but only if you don't spend your time diddling with the words. Longer than 8 minutes and an old diddler like me will be tempted to diddle.
I don't use her "write 20 pages in 2 hours" approach, but I do write each scene in a block from beginning to end without stopping, for as many pages as that first visceral "heart draft" of the scene needs to be.
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