Also be familiar with your browser's History function. It's a little tricky in Chrome Mobile: you have to type chrome:history in the address window. I therefore made a bookmark of History.
Also, if you enter the course via the app, tapping the top bar will quickly reveal all 12 modules as hot links. The text on the bar will indicate whatever module was visited last, a kind of reminder, but the entire list will always appear for your convenience.
This course is divided into 12 "modules," which are sessions that focus on a particular aspect of screenwriting. Within each module, you have two or three tasks:
I spend a good amount of time in this course showing you how screenplays are put together, not only by my own lights but by the analyses of others who have written about and taught screenwriting. I take apart a number of scripts/movies for you, showing you what makes them tick. This is knowledge, the information you need to digest before you try to put together a screenplay yourself.
Since it's easier to be analytical about something that already exists than to create something from nothing - which is exactly what any writer has to do - I also take a second and more personal approach to the material. I let you:
I began in fiction, and one of the most influential learning experiences I ever had was studying a book of short stories which printed both the corrected first draft and final draft of stories by established writers.
What impressed me, and has kept with me to this day, was the visual, documented evidence that writing is a process - and, most importantly, that it's okay to be bad, even terrible, in the beginning of this process.
By letting you watch me at work as I develop parts of a script from concept to structure to first draft to first rewrite - and in the beginning of this process working both as a tree person (planning ahead) and as a forest person (diving right in) - I hope to show you, in no uncertain terms, that the task before you involves a continuous process of writing and rewriting and rewriting again.
Since the Fourth Edition, I also let you compare two complete screenplays: one that I optioned and the script as rewritten in collaboration with a producer. See rewriting with a producer.
The "reminder icon"
appears throughout this course whenever you have a writing exercise. I am
going to guide you through the process of writing a screenplay, from
concept to structure (with a paradigm chart if you're a tree person - and/or a
step outline and/or a treatment) to first draft to first rewrite. That's a lot of
work.
A great advantage to this course is that you get to set your own schedule. Most of you reading this are students or have other careers. You have a busy life in either case. You may not be able to go through this course as quickly as you would like to.
Don't worry about it. You'll learn that screenwriting always has new secrets to reveal. You're not going to learn everything there is to know in this course or any other course or book, or even in the next decade, even if you begin selling early and get rich. The screenplay is such a wondrous and finely tuned piece of efficient narrative that one never gets tired of exploring the storytelling power hidden within its "less is more" engine.
What I urge you to do, however, is to approach the writing parts of this course with some kind of plan. You might want to give the electronic book a quick read, just to see what lies ahead. Or maybe you want to do one module a month and take a year to get through the course. Or one a week and get through it in three months.
Use the Writing Track button from any screen to connect quickly to any writing assignment in the course.
There's a lot of information here to absorb. Most of it is available elsewhere - but I know of no single place where you can get as much of it. I explore no less than seven screenplay paradigms and show how all are actually derived from one concept - that stories have a beginning, a middle and an end.
But I hope it's the personal features of this course that help you the most - because that's the approach that helped me most early in my own career.
I don't expect you to agree with everything I have to say or to like everything that I write. But you can learn from my stupidity and bad writing as much as you can learn from whatever wisdom and talent you may attribute to me.
So your task is threefold:
When your draft and first rewrite are done, I'm going to give you as honest and straight-forward a look at the marketplace as you're likely to find anywhere. I'm not hiding any of the "tough facts" from you here, nor giving you false hopes of striking it rich. You are engaged in the most competitive and ruthless writing game in town, and you are better off to realize this from the beginning.
Only the tough survive to make a career of screenwriting. But even if you never sell a screenplay, learning the secrets of script structure will change the way you look at movies and give you a new appreciation for the spectacle of the Hollywood movie and the collaborative art form of film.
You can learn to be skilled at the screenwriter's craft. I call that achievement becoming a screenwright after the root used in "playwright" or "millwright" (a "wright" is a skilled or artistic worker).
Thousands of bad, uncrafted screenplays get written every year. So do a lot of well-crafted ones. My job is to move you from the first category into the second.
Shall we begin?
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