Inside The Cover
Book Reviews
Review by Melissa Prusi
So Your Mama Loves It, But Is It Ready for the Big Time?
The 10 Most Common Mistakes Screenwriters Make (And How You Can Avoid Them)
By Sheila Gallien
2003
E-book (screenwriting)
Available at http://www.sheilagallien.com/ebook.html
Sheila Gallien reads scripts for a living. Having worked in Hollywood for over a decade as, among other things, a freelance reader, an assistant to a literary agent at CAA, and a professional script consultant, she’s read hundreds of screenplays. When you’ve slogged through that many fish-out-of-water comedies, buddy-cop dramas, and supernatural thrillers, you start to develop a sense for what works and what doesn’t, and Gallien has distilled her thoughts on the subject into her new
e-book, So Your Mama Loves It, But Is it Ready for the Big Time? The 10 Most Common Mistakes Screenwriters Make (And How You Can Avoid
Them).
Starting with the difficult-to-contradict premise that the biggest mistake you can make is sending in a screenplay that isn’t ready, Gallien goes on to explain why the script you’ve labored so long and hard over probably isn’t. That sounds harsh, which isn’t the tone of the book at all. Rather, Gallien shows a healthy respect for how tough it is to create a screenplay that’s truly ready to show to producers, emphasizing that it takes not only talent and inspiration but also hard work, practice and dedication to turn out a script that will make an impression on a professional reader.
Remember that phrase, “hard work,” because I predict that after reading So Your Mama Loves It...
you’re going to realize that you have a lot more to do on your latest script.
In chapters that delve into structure, character development, exposition, description and dialogue, Gallien offers sensible advice for making your screenplay more focused, more compelling, and more professional. She uses examples from recent movies to illustrate her points on subjects like constructing story points that are connected without being contrived and creating an original, interesting protagonist. Throughout the book, her ideas are fresh and thoughtful and presented in a light, conversational tone that makes it a fun, easy read.
Each chapter concludes with “Questions for your story,” a “cheat sheet” of sorts that will help you apply Gallien’s advice to your own screenplay. Some of the questions will seem obvious, particularly for writers who have been at this for a while, but if your goal is to have a script that’s really ready to be sent out to professional readers, you’d better be able to answer them.
What it comes down to, as Gallien keeps reminding us, is that everything matters. Scenes that meander pointlessly, characters that fail to capture the reader’s imagination, plot threads that are left dangling, all can trip you up on your way to that big production deal. Gallien’s book, with its straightforward advice, can help you find your script’s problems. And isn’t that better than letting a professional reader find them?
Melissa Prusi lives, works and writes (though not as much as she should) in
Minneapolis. She also runs her own movie review website, inexplicably called
Gorilla Pants. (www.gorillapants.com)
