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There are many screenwriting-guides out there. What makes this one any different?

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The Problem with “Advice”
Visit any large bookstore, type a search into Google, ask someone in-the-know – by whichever means you choose to learn the art of the screenwriter, you’re guaranteed to find a plethora of sources and a wealth of good advice.

The problem is; what may be good advice for them, may not be good advice for you. And what is good advice in general, may be bad advice for the project you have in mind.

So how do you translate all this information? How do you know which snippets to throw away and which to paint gold and hang on your figurative mantelpiece? Well, there’s a difference between what you’re told and how you use it. It’s all down to how you interpret the advice you are given and, in this blog, I shall attempt to show you how.

The problem with advice is that everyone’s always telling you how to do things – quite often, it’s also how they do things – and, in actual fact, that’s not what you need to know. You could, if you so wished, follow their instructions to the letter. It might work, it might be exactly what you needed. Or it could be something that just doesn’t work for you. And that’s not a bad thing – it’s because you’re you, not them.

The trick lies, not in learning how to do-as-they-do, but in learning why they do-as-they-do. Figure out why their method works for them and you can see, firstly, whether it’s likely to work for you and, secondly, how to come up with your own method that works best for you too.

And the same is true everywhere – sometimes to even greater effect.

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Break the Rules
If you can learn the golden rules of screenwriting then you can become a good screenwriter. However, if you learn why those rules work – why the 3-act structure is near-gospel, why it’s so hard to mix horror and comedy, why your audience need to like your hero – once you know why the rules work, you’re free to break them.

Break the rules normally and you end up with little more than a waste of ink and paper. However, if you know why the rules work – and not just what the rules say – then you can devise your own rules which break the old ones but still fulfill that all important “why”.

Learn how to do that and you can change an amnesia storyline from a soap-opera cliché into Memento. You can change a few loosely-connected short-stories into Pulp Fiction. Most importantly, you can change yourself from a good screenwriter into a great screenwriter.

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And Away We Go…
In every blog-post which follows this, I shall endeavour to explain why the advice I impart seems to work. I’ll also take a swing at some of the How-To-Write bibles out there (such as the late Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat or Robert McKee’s Story) and explain how (and why) to break their rules when necessary.

I am already suitably braced for accusations of heresy. However, while you prepare the pyre to burn me at the stake, feel free to read on at your leisure…

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