A good book review is itself a work of art. The following review will show you what we mean. (As well as giving you a terrific sense of the book being discussed. We’re clicking over to Amazon to buy it right now.)
by Henry Sheppard
I’ve read a lot of screenwriting advice books. They come in a range of styles and vary in value from dubious to priceless. One of the recent additions to the canon is Xander Bennett‘s Screenwriting Tips, You Hack: 150 Practical Pointers for Becoming a Better Screenwriter.
Xander was a script reader, working for a minor production company in Los Angeles, when he became frustrated by the quality of the screenplays he was reading. He tweeted his complaints until someone told him he should put them in a blog. So he moved to publishing the Screenwriting Tips… You Hack blog as “a snarky diatribe.” Since 2009 he has posted a tip a day on how to make spec scripts better. His first tip reads:
Don’t be boring. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON’T BE BORING. Tape it to your laptop. Tape it to your eyeballs. Don’t. Be. Boring.
Good advice, I thought. (Actually, it was a rule invoked by Billy Wilder in each of his various writing partnerships. Or, more accurately, his two rules were “Thou Shalt Not Bore” and “Anything is Permitted” — Lally, Wilder Times, but that’s a digression.)