Scenewriting: The Missing Manual for Screenwriters

You’ve got an idea for the next great screenplay. Maybe you’re just getting started or perhaps you’ve spent time with other screenwriting books, and you have your hero’s journey, plot twists, reversals, and cat-saving scenes all worked out. Either way, what stands between you and an outstanding finished screenplay are the blank pages that you must fill with cinematic life, energy, conflict, and emotion. So how on Earth do you do that?

The secret is scenewriting.

This thorough and effective guide will help the beginner and the professional master the most critical and overlooked part of the screenwriting process: the art and craft of writing scenes. With step-by-step instruction, and numerous exercises, you will learn how to transform an outline into a fully-developed script. Learn how to prepare scenes for writing, construct sparkling, naturalistic dialogue, utilize scene description and the unique structure of the screenplay format to maximum advantage, and polish your scenes so that your idea becomes the script you always imagined it could be.

Through scenewriting, great ideas become brilliant scripts.

Eric Sanders is Adjunct Assistant Professor of Writing and Multi-Media at Hampshire College, USA. Sanders is an award-winning playwright, screenwriter, film producer, and director. He began his film work as a production assistant at Good Machine (co-founded by James Schamus and Ted Hope). Sanders’s plays and films have had productions and screenings in London, Paris, Berlin, Edinburgh, and throughout the U.S.

Chris Perry is Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at Hampshire College, USA. Perry is a screenwriter, director, and producer who worked at both Pixar and Rhythm & Hues Studios before he began teaching at Hampshire College in 1999. Perry won a Sci-Tech Oscar in 2014 and joined the Writers Guild of America in 2017.