Book Writing and Screenwriting Parallels

Storytelling is Storytelling!

“Trust your own instinct. Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else’s.” – Billy Wilder

I like to joke that the Writers Guild of America in Los Angeles must have an entire wing in my name from all the drafts of screenplays I registered with them over the years. When I first started writing scripts, I had an obsessive need to make sure every brilliant word I penned, usually during lunch hours at my 9–5 day job, was registered with a higher authority than my Brother Word Processor. Looking back, I really had little to worry about unless there was some rogue screenwriting bandit in search of bad to mediocre beginner screenplays.

But somewhere amidst all those dozens of drafts — I learned how to write movies. Later, I translated what I’d learned, to spicing up the memoirs and other nonfiction books I wrote as a book ghostwriter.

Here are 3 big parallels I found between screenwriting and book writing:

I. Logline

In Screenwriting: The Logline. A one sentence, clear and compelling description of the story in the screenplay. The “WIIFM” (What’s in it for me?) for the movie’s audience — the answer to the question: What’s interesting about this movie and why should I care about it?