Trottier’s book has been one of my favorites for a very long time. He has great examples, a good conversational voice, and he highlights so many of the important components to screenwriting, from beginning to end. As I began work on one of my screenplays about four years ago, I picked up a copy of this and carried it around everywhere my script went. It was a great read straight through without a script in hand, but it’s also a great tool to have beside you when you have a question and need to thumb through to find your specific answer. I’ll, more than likely, come back to this book as the series continues.

Software

As I began to immerse myself back into screenwriting, I didn’t want to pay too much money for software. That was for a long-term investment, and if you are wanting to play around at the start to see if screenwriting is something you seriously want to pursue as a long-term endeavor, then you might want to check out cheaper software options.

The best option for screenwriting software that is cheap (read: free) and awesome is Celtx. I have been using this software for years. “Celtx is the world’s first all-in-one media pre-production system. It replaces ‘paper & binder’ pre-production with a digital approach that’s more complete, simpler to work with, and easier to share.” There are very cool add-ons you can purchase (but don’t have to) and templates for just about everything you might want to do: film, audio-visual, theatre, audio play, storyboards, and comic books. Like I mentioned above, it is free, but for a very small monthly fee, you can have an account where you are allowed, through Celtx Studio, to collaborate with others on projects.

If you want to invest in your screenwriting career and cough up some dough, then I would suggest you check out Final Draft. It is an industry standard, and it hasn’t steered me wrong since I began using it about 3, 4 years ago. Cost runs between $129 to $199; the cheaper price is for the academic-military edition. The link I’m giving you is to a great site, Writers Store, which touts itself as the premier resource for writing and filmmaking tools. Don’t blame me if you go and get more than just the software.

A Final Note & Some Homework

Here’s the final note: You have a book you want to turn into a screenplay, right? Pick that baby up and flip to the end. How long is it? 250 pages? 300 pages? Dare I say, over 400 pages? Well, a typical movie these days runs between two and two-and-a-half hours. A script page equals about a minute of movie time, so a typical script can run between 120 and 150 pages. Three-hundred page book – 120-page screenplay. 300 … 120. Quite a difference. This is a good note to leave you with in the first part of this series. Put in your mind now that a lot of your beautiful book will be cut so that you can fashion the best parts of it into a screenplay. Will talk more about this in future parts, but for now—think on it.

Here’s the homework: It’s fun, I promise. Go pick up a few movies that are within the same genre(s) are your novel and watch them. For now, this is for entertainment. It might even be a good idea to find books within your genre that have been made into movies. If you could read those books and watch the movie adaptations, the activity will give you good insight into what stays and what goes and what gets remixed when a book is turned into a film.

At the end of each part of the series, I will suggest a few books that have been turned into successful movies. Always good to study up. Here are my three for this part, and each comes from a different genre.

• Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs
• Mario Puzo’s The Godfather
• Lauren Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada