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During the holidays is the perfect time. You can get the McGuffin you need to complete your quest, then afterward take it back to the store under the Extended Return Period policy.
You can't quest for a McGuffin, let alone return it for store credit, without allies. Right now they're hiding in the woodwork like termites. Spraying with Raid might help...
This was the first screenwriting book I read and is still my favourite. I highly recommend it.
Save the Cat is kind of essential reading just so you know about it but please don’t follow it as gospel. So many writers have and we’ve ended up with thousands of similar scripts which are pretty much ruined because they’ve forced their inciting incident to happen on page 25 or something like that. The golden rule for me when following the advice from a book on screenplays is how successful in their writing career they have been. Blake Snyder made a lot of money from selling around 12 screenplays in the late ’80s and early ’90s. These include Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, Blank Check, and Nuclear Family. The first is a terrible film, the second two I’ve never heard of. I’m not sure they were ever produced.
So Blake found a successful formula for selling scripts that worked on a few studios thirty years ago, and yet his method is supposed to be the best way to go about it now? WTF?
Anyway, good books to read about the business in general I recommend are:
Adventures in the Screen Trade and Which Lie Did I Tell by the now dearly departed William Goldman
Tales from The Script by Peter Hanson
As for Robert Mckee I have a lot of time for the man. Just look up his career! His books are hard to get through but I was lucky enough to attend his three day Story seminar and he really knows his stuff. Some people don’t like his politics or opinions but I loved it. I wrote a blog about the seminar if you fancy a read.