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by Bruce McKenna

Advanced Screenwriting: Raising Your Script to the Academy Award Level
By Dr. Linda Seger. Silman-James Press, 236 pages, softcover, $24.95

Linda Seger's first book, Making a Good Script Great, was published two decades ago and was immediately embraced as a welcome relief from Syd Field and a huge step forward in scriptwriting bibles.

The five books she has published since then have all been worthwhile, but none of them has constituted a quantum leap like the first one. Until now.

Just check out the chapter on character transformation. Seger analyzes As Good as it Gets and Tootsie in emotional terms–how the characters motivate change in each other. Her breakdowns of these stories, in those terms, are so clear and so compelling they may make the reader reconsider every movie they've ever seen. Or written.

The book is very much aimed at helping the veteran, but there is nothing here that would confuse a neophyte. The years since Seger's first book have seen the market flooded with screenwriting manuals. With this volume, Seger reclaims her crown. My highest recommendation.

Successful Television Writing
By Lee Goldberg and William Rabkin. John Wiley & Sons Inc., 209 pages, softcover, $24.95

This is a highly worthwhile look at TV writing–not for its insights into the writing per se, but for its analyses of the politics and mechanics of story departments.

There are brilliant writers who can't get a job on a show to save their lives, while less stellar talents prosper. This book spends much of its word count on illuminating the roots of that situation. This isn't just about how to write, it's about how to get hired and how to stay employed.

The authors have worked as a TV writing team for years, and their story of rising from freelance hopefuls to successful showrunners is enlightening and insightful. Throughout, Goldberg and Rabkin maintain a level of humour and self-deprecation that help make this book a winner.

The First Time I Got Paid For It…Writers' Tales from the Hollywood Trenches
Edited by Peter Lefcourt and Laura J. Shapiro. Da Capo Press, 254 pages, softcover, $22.95

The premise: 54 screenwriters deliver short pieces describing the first time they got paid to write. The result: a delightful and incredibly diverse collection of tales.

None of these stories is over six pages long, and it is obvious that Lefcourt and Shapiro have made an effort to include a cross-section of film and television writers in terms of gender and race as well as notoriety and experience.

Many of the writers veer quite far from the premise, mostly to good effect. There are stories of years of struggle followed by sudden success, of sudden success followed by years of struggle–and a handful of stories of youthful ignorance leading to instant success. They are all about the screenwriting life, and, as such, can provide an important antidote to the most common problems of the writer: solitude and despair.

One of the most poignant contributions in this 2002 publication is Tina Andrews' story of being invited to meet with Alex Haley at his farm in Tennessee, for the purpose of collaborating on a script. Tina noticed a framed board with a dime, a nickel and three pennies mounted on it. When she asked her host about it, he explained it was all the money he had in the world the day he got the call that Rootswas being published.