Writing resources!

During the 3 months of funded writing on Tales of Zale, I dove into a bunch of different resources. For anybody else interested in writing their own screenplays, short stories, or whatnot I thought I'd give some personal recommendations. I may add to this list as I discover more along the way or recall something that I might have missed. So feel free to check back from time to time!

BOOKS:

• 'Animation Writing and Development' by Jean Ann Wright

This book was probably my favorite to dive into on the regular. On the surface, it comes off as a school book - and it kind of is. But that easy-to-dive-into-ness is part of its strength! The book goes through different approaches to structure, and how to write a script from outline to treatment, all the way into formatting and final polish. It also has some nice insights into developmental ages in kids' audiences. There are a few slightly outdated parts - I wouldn't take the script sample, section on web-animation, nor the pitch bible chapter too literally. But the rest is a very worthwhile read, especially for somebody (like me) dabbling into scriptwriting for real for the first time.

• 'How to Write for Animation' by Jeffery Scott

This one is very similar to 'Animation Writing and Development'. They overlap in many places and supplement each other in others. While this book doesn't boast a section on developmental ages or anything like that, it does have a bit more industry insight - at least on the American front. I do think that the sample scripts and pitch bible are a bit more solid. Although from my own experience, I'd still take that pitch bible guide with a grain of salt, since it's a very generalized example.

• 'Screenwriter's Bible' by David Trotter

Now we start getting into the very Hollywood-influenced books. Personally, I found that this book leaned a bit too heavily on what it takes to write a good spec script and get into the American film industry to really be useful to me in this particular context. If its short chapter on writing for animation is anything to go by, that part of the industry is really not something that interests this writer. That said, it has a gold mine of film examples worth diving into, and probably the best section on script formatting among any of these books. 

• 'Save the Cat' by Blake Snyder

Save the Cat is that one book on writing stories that everybody recommends to start off with. And it's no wonder - it's quite an entertaining read while also being informative. It's so popular that it's become a bit contentious: apparently, some writers follow its story beats and pacing guidelines to such a close degree that their scripts might run the danger of feeling quite repetitive in the grander scheme. In my personal opinion, this one is a little too "Hollywood feature" for me, but I think it's still nice to reflect on some of the ideas presented.

• 'The TV Writer's Workbook' by Ellen Sandler

I haven't been completely fair to this book. I received it last, and since it seemed that a lot of its content was already covered in the other books, I haven't yet taken the time to give it a proper read. I do want to give it a proper chance later on. While two of the prior book have been animation-specific and the two others have been feature-film-specific, this is the only one that is live-action TV-series-specific. From my quick skims, it seems to be more focused on breaking into the American industry as a TV writer though.

• 'Story' by Robert McKee

Moving on to some books I listened to as audiobooks a while back! I think 'Story' is a nice book to ground you before embarking on a long writing journey. It warns of some of the pitfalls green writers may fall into. To me though, the author did come off as a bit of a jerk between the lines. Weirdly enough, that really got me fired up to "show him who's boss" at the end of every chapter. It probably won't be the same for everybody, but my main takeaway ended up being that this is a great motivational book to give you that extra kick to get started.

• 'Hero with a Thousand Faces' by Joseph Campbell

This is another classic title that comes up a lot. I listened to it as an audiobook a while back, but to be honest I feel like I'm going to have to give it another read at my own pace at some point to really digest it. This book doesn't focus on how to write an amazing screenplay but rather dives into the nature of our storytelling itself. It studies commonalities in myths across cultures. If you've ever heard about the "hero's journey", this is the book that popularized that term.

You may have seen it in other variations of it as well. For example, I remember Dan Harmon's "story circle" going around a while back. These are narrative structures that we seem drawn to throughout history in one form or another.

VIDEOS:

Starship Goldfish

Starship Goldfish is obviously very passionate about writing, you can tell that much just from the pilot episodes he's already put out for his series. Lucky for us, he shares some of that passion through this series of videos, breaking down some different concepts in writing and production in a very easy-to-get-into way. (I think some of these are mainly made for his Patreon, but he shared the playlist link on Twitter, so I think it's fair game to share?) A lil' hidden gem.

PODCASTS:

• Dead Pilots Society 

In this podcast, industry professionals do table reads of pilots that never got off the ground, but are nonetheless very worthwhile or interesting. I find that it helps me to have that kind of "narrator's voice" in my head when I'm reading through a script. For that, Dead Pilots Society is great. Listening to a few episodes really gives you a good idea of the rhythm and pacing of a professional script - and it's usually very entertaining as well!

• Story Break 

Three Hollywood writers come up with story ideas and workshop them together. I got into Story Break when they started doing Heaven Heist, in which they take one of their previous ideas and start writing a full feature script, one scene per episode. It's really cool to see how they work off of each other and how their ideas evolve. There's a spontaneity and looseness to it all that makes it very easy to think "hey, I can do that" and jump right into writing. 

SCRIPTS:

• She-ra: Save the Cat 

Noelle Stevenson has shared the script for one of the episodes she wrote for She-ra and the Princesses of Power. I re-visited this script so many times while writing. The style is quite different from what I'm going for of course, but it was one of the most concrete script samples I could find from an animated TV show, so I took a lot of form pointers from it. As a non-native English speaker, sometimes I've got to kick my brain into gear to capture the right language. And reading and re-reading this script helped get me into that mode.

• BBC Scripts 

Some other scripts that I consulted with were some of the general scripts put out on BBC's website. There aren't that many animated shows on there though - it mainly ended up being Danger Mouse and Dennis and Gnasher.

SOFTWARE:

• Dramaqueen

As far as I can understand, Final Draft seems to be the industry standard for scriptwriting software a lot of places. But this German writer recommended me Dramaqueen and I've never looked back since. It handles most of the formatting for you so you just have to focus on writing. And the best part is that the majority of it is free, so you can just jump straight into things.

• Grammarly

As mentioned, English isn't my first language. And even if it were, mistakes happen. Grammarly really helps circumvent some of those dumb mistakes!

OTHER:

• I stumbled upon this tweet by Tony Tost a while back. It's basically a checklist of good pointers from all sorts of different writing resources. When things were getting tough with the writer, and I was starting to feel like I was forgetting up from down, this list really helped ground me and remind me of some of the things that I find to be good writing.

• Many of my resources either come from or are listed in this long list of writing resources. I'm not familiar with who is the original compiler of this list. It was posted in a discord channel that I really should be more active in, but alas. It's a great list and there's so much content to be dug through.

Know any other writing resources you want to recommend? Feel free to comment!