Crafting Short Screenplays That Connect

By Claudia Hunter Johnson

Book Overview

Crafting Short Screenplays That Connect, Sixth Edition, stands alone among screenwriting books by emphasizing that human connection, though often overlooked, is as essential to writing effective screenplays as conflict.

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 Johnson'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 25th Anniversary Edition features 11 short screenplays, including Academy Award winning Barry Jenkins' (Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk) luminous short film, My Josephine (now in the Criterion Collection), and an accompanying companion website that features the completed films and additional screenplay examples. The book has also been updated and expanded to include more excerpts from leading films and TV series as well as collaboration exercises and invaluable guidance about giving and receiving effective feedback.

This ground-breaking 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. It remains an absolute must have resource for students of screenwriting.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1032880325
• ISBN13: 9781032880327
• Release Date: May 2025
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 388 Pages
• Weight: 1.67 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

best book on writing short films out there

Don't think for a second that Claudia Hunter Johnson's approach leads to sappy emo films. Far from it. I know because I watched it work. We teach students the three-act 120-page paradigm, but we ask them to shoot 3- to 10-minute shorts. All too often they end up with pedestrian comedy sketches or twist-at-the-end `gotchas' or creaky attempts at a cut-down genre piece (how much blood and special effects can you cram into 10 minutes?). It frustrated both me and my students. But Johnson's Discovery-Deliberation-Decision-Action approach showed just what we were missing: the drama of human connection and disconnection. Because... ...discovery is always rife with conflict because it means someone has to make a choice between action or no action, and connection/disconnection always leads to consequences of some sort. Of course there are beginnings, middles and ends in shorts... Aristotle isn't spinning in his grave. But taking Johnson's 4-step approach lets us drop into the world of the short at any number of Aristotelian places to explore whatever creates the most impact on either the character or the audience, or both. Once we realized this, my students started turning out some wonderfully gutsy scripts and subsequent films. Some were still firmly within specific genres, especially horror. Some were experimental. Some were gentle. Some still functioned with a twist at the end. But the journey through them was more engaging and more powerful because it was more human. As for the DVD, it's true most of the films have a 'moral' of some kind. But 'My Josephine' is determinedly unsentimental and edges toward the experimental, and the mockumentary at the end is, well, just silly fun. If you want to try your hand at a script, or at a short, this is the only book to give you the right tools.

The best Screenwriting book out there

Very detailed book on the many aspects of screenwriting. Johnson goes through not just the contruction and process of screenplays, but how to approach and think about writing. Althought the tile is specific to short screenplays, this book has the fundementals of writing freature lengths as well. The best!

What a Great Screenwriting Coach!

This wonderful little book is for you, the student of screenwriting. How do I know? I had the good fortune of being in Dr. Claudia Hunter Johnson's screenwriting class at Florida State University. We used the methods described in her book and they work! If you are disciplined enough to follow her process, you will amaze yourself. You will begin with Le Menu (your very own personal autobiography) and finish with a well-crafted script. Although you will not have her direct feedback, you will have the benefit of a script coach who has helped launch a thousand careers. Tom.

This book is a real gem.

I stumbled on it recently when I was at the Samuel French bookstore on Sunset Blvd. In the heart of Hell-A (oops, scratch that - L.A. has no heart!) Anyway, there are tons of screenwriting books in that store. Tons. But I happened to pick this one up and start reading the Introduction. Very insightful. So I bought it (should've bought it here, though - it's cheaper), and I ended up devouring it pretty damn quickly. The writing is terrific - very conversational, accessible, smart, and at times bust-a-gut funny. But most impressive, the author sheds light on the importance of "connection" in the storytelling process. It made me think back about how many times in writing classes CONFLICT CONFLICT CONFLICT had been shoved down my throat. Okay, okay, I got it already! But, she points out, it's only half the story (the yin to the yang, or ya know, vice-versa...) - as she goes on to wonderfully illustrate and illuminate. Also, the sample student scripts are great additions. I especially got a big laugh out of "The Making of 'Killer Kite.'" I may have to spring for the companion video just to see how that film turned out. Yeah, yeah, the book has "short screenplays" in the title, but the points she makes are applicable to scripts of any length. You can bet that even this jaded L.A. feature film writer will be incorporating a lot of her insights in his own creative process. I'm looking forward to any follow-ups from this author, because she's finally brought something new - and important -- to the endless discussions (and how-to books) on screenwriting.

Crafting Short Screenplays that Connect

What I liked most about this book was its conversational style. Very down-to-earth, but it maintains a sense of professionalism as well. Claudia really knows what she's talking about - not only book knowledge, but also life experience. Of course, that isn't all there is to like about this book. Her insights are well-thought-out and well-defined. It's good to see something in the genre that doesn't focus on Conflict as the sole driving force in the narrative form. And, finally, on a practical level, I believe the book is well-ordered and well put together. And the length of the chapters is inviting, rather than daunting. You can read a chapter easily in one sitting; because so much of the learning process is not *reading*, but *doing*, I feel that the brief chapters allow much more time to get to the 'doing' portion of learning, the really meaningful stuff. In short, I wish all text-books were this accessible and enjoyable.