Just finished Syd Field’s Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting. It was a good review of the most well-known screenwriter’s teaching.
Boiling it down:
Act I – The setup
–Plot point 1
Act II – Confrontation
–Plot point 2
Act III – Resolution
Each act has a beginning, middle and end.
Field uses real scripts, real movies and years of training to cover the discipline from concept to finished script.
It was actually my second read and I did absorb more.
I have had a couple of scripts in the works for ages now. I suffer from writer’s block often and Field speaks to that. He also covers collaboration, adaptation and copyrighting.
Just brilliant.