Crafting Short Screenplays That Connect

Book excerpt: Crafting Short Screenplays That Connect, Fourth Edition stands alone among screenwriting books by emphasizing that human connection, though often overlooked, is as essential to writing effective screenplays as conflict. This groundbreaking book will show you how to advance and deepen your screenwriting skills, increasing your ability to write richer, more resonant short screenplays that will connect with your audience. With her candid, conversational style, award-winning writer and director Claudia Hunter Johnson teaches you the all-important basics of dramatic technique and guides you through the challenging craft of writing short screenplays with carefully focused exercises of increasing length and complexity. In completing these exercises and applying Claudia’s techniques and insights to your own work, you will learn how to think more deeply about the screenwriter’s purpose, craft effective patterns of human change, and strengthen your storytelling skills. This new edition has been expanded and updated to include: A companion website (www.focalpress.com/cw/johnson) with ten award-winning short films featured in the book, including two outstanding, all-new short films—Intercambios and the Student-Emmy-Award-winning Underground A new chapter on scene and structure that will help you find the right structure for your short screenplay A new chapter on crafting effective dialogue and subtext that will teach you to make the most of every word and add further depth to your script