Benefits Of Reading Scripts And Watching Movies by John Truby Video Lecture | Screenwriting: From Beginner to a Pro - Career Development

Gela in your lifetime have you seen more
movies or read more scripts and it's
either more important than the other
when it comes to a screenwriting career
I have seen so many movies and read so
many scripts that couldn't even begin to
count which one I've done more of but
they're both very important if somebody
wants to write screenplays
professionally and I say that for two
reasons first of all when it comes to
watching film that's really where I
learned my train as a writer and where I
developed all my techniques having to do
with how do you write a script that will
make a great film what I did was for
about a three-year period I went to
classic cinema and watched to you know
really high level films a day and took
notes in the dark and what I was looking
for were the patterns what were the
elements that were found in every great
film it would do such elements even
exist and I found that they did and from
that I was able to develop really the
centerpiece of what I talked about in
story which is the seven key steps of
every great story from that I also then
developed the more detailed 22 steps of
every great story these are steps in
every good script no matter how long no
matter how short no matter what medium
no matter what genre and these are
really the keys to successful
storytelling
now it's also important that writers
read a lot of scripts because it's only
by reading a lot of scripts that you get
a sense especially of the pacing that a
professional script has and you only see
that when you've read a lot of them but
once you've read a lot of them you see
how quickly does this story
established in the script because keep
in mind that the reader the person that
we need to get through in order to sell
that script the reader has read many
many scripts and their normal response
to a script is no so we have to break
that pattern in their mind now they
formed that know in their head in the
first 10 pages and so reading a lot of
scripts gives the writer a sense of what
do I have to have accomplished in those
first 10 pages to keep the reader
reading and to give them a chance to say
yes
you