The Screenwriter's Bible: A Complete Guide to Writing, Formatting, and Selling Your Script

This book is well worth the money, and more. An excellent beginning screenplay writer's guide. Combine this with Robert McKee's book Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwritingy and you have a heck of a learning tool.

If you are thinking of enrolling in a film school to study how to write scripts, GET THIS BOOK FIRST. You might save a lot of money. This book has everything. It's easy to read. I wish I'd found this book before wasting tons of money on U*LA.

Screenwriters Bible?

This is what your girl friend would give you in her return visit from the library; she would "make you a tape"; she would go to the library, get a whole bunch of things that have the label "screenwriting" and shove them in this little file when she heard your going to be screenwriting.

I honestly thought that this thing would be a large book that deals exclusively with script format.

The truth is that this guy basically went to the Screenwriters section in a library, tore out a whole bunch of pages from everything he could get his hands on and shoved it into this little book.

It is everything and nothing at all.

Sorry. If you dont have access to many things as is, if you dont have access to a library, a book store, the internet, if you are in the Amazon Jungle where no signs of life exist for hundreds of miles, then this might be the best book out there.

If you are truly void of all resources,
cannot get your hands on anything in regards to Screenwriting,
this collage of snipets from everything under the sun might be for you.

One of the most useless books out there. (But then again, so are most screenwriting books).

Not the best for Format. Thats for sure.

This book is most helpful on formatting tips, story arc and how things look on a screenplay. That aside the book isn't entirely necessary because of screenplay writing programs such as Final Draft or Screenwriter which tackle the formatting and appearance issues so the writer doesn't have to. Also, don't take a lot of the advice and "rules" Trottier gives and lays out too seriously or set-in-stone because it's all coming from a guy who hasn't sold a single screenplay all his own. He's a teacher and the old saying, "those who can't do, teach," definitely applies to this guy. If you want to learn the screenwriting craft, reading this book certainly does not hurt one bit; so, pick it up and draw your own conclusions.

THE SCREENWRITER'S BIBLE, in one volume, comprises six substantial guidebooks:

Book I: How to Write a Screenplay--A Primer;
Book II: 7 Steps to a Stunning Script--A Workbook;
Book III: Proper Formatting Technique--A Style Guide;
Book IV: Writing & Revising Your Breakthrough--A Script Consultant's View;
Book V: How to Sell Your Script--A Marketing Plan;
Book VI: Resources and General Index.

The book's large format 386 pages, eleven by eight-and-a-half inches, would equal at least 600 pages in the more common format of nine-by-six inches.

Book I: How to Write a Screenplay. Aptly subtitled a primer, it presents a compact introduction to screenwriting. In particular, Trottier focuses on the three-act structure with six key turning or plot points: the catalyst; the big event; the pinch (or midpoint); the crisis (low point); the showdown; the realization. Throughout, the author includes examples from well-known films.

Book II: 7 Steps to a Stunning Script. This workbook includes 25 checkpoint lists and a character/action grid.

Book III: Proper Formatting Technique--A Style Guide. "The spec script is the selling script, sometimes called the writer's draft. You write it with the idea of selling it later or circulating it as a sample. Once it is sold and goes into pre-production, it will be transformed into a shooting script, also known as the production draft. The spec-script style avoids camera angles, editing directions, and technical intrusions" (page 114). To illustrate formatting a spec script, Trottier includes his humorous three-page script "The Perspicacious Professor." This book convinced me to use the author's software "Dr Format" instead of "Final Draft."

Book IV: Writing & Revising Your Breakthrough--A Script Consultant's View. Trottier provides tips on "how to direct the camera without using camera directions" and exercises, based on his clients' scripts, to guide reader in revising to current spec-writing style.

Book V: How to Sell Your Script--A Marketing Plan. In addition to numerous suggestions on marketing, Trottier cautions screenwriters to protect their works. "Registering one's copyright and displaying the copyright notice on the script's title page is no longer seen as something done by paranoid writers." Writers Guild of America will register one-page synopsis, longer treatments, as well as draft(s) of a screenplay.

Book VI: Resources and General Index. This book includes several lists containing "carefully selected entries." I promptly looked up the first entry: "Updates to The Screenwriter's Bible" on the author's website... and found a useful tip on formatting as well as revisions on one of the exercises in Book IV. Presumably these changes will be included in the next edition.

Five shining stars to this book.
-- C J Singh