The Coffee Break Screenwriter: Writing Your Script Ten Minutes at a Time - 2nd Edition

This book is filled with brilliantly articulated tools to help overcome (the excuse) of not having the time or inspiration to write. It's delivered in a practical style and written in a friendly and warm way. Read it straight through or just go straight to the places where you may be hung up. Keep in mind, this book isn't a template that substitutes for creativity but a bulldozer that breaks down walls to help your creativity to come through. Highly recommend whether you have the smallest hint of a good concept or a fully-formed idea you need help refining.

Digital Media Specialist here. Bachelors degree, with an emphasis in film and television. I've taken a lot of classes...both live and online. I've participated in writing groups led by professionals and amateurs, alike. I've also read a few books on screenwriting, and skimmed several others. For me, this book tops them all. I'm facilitating a writing group this fall, and I've encouraged every participant to buy their own copy of this book.

I absolutely love this book. There is so much practical and easy to apply advice in here. As I have been working on my screenplay, I refer back to this book often. It has definitely helped with the planning process as well as with my writing it. I HIGHLY recommend this book. It's one of the best out on the market.

Purchase Kindle version. Nice. Easy to read. Easy to understand. Excellent reference resource.

Great guidelines on the writing process. Pilar makes it real easy to understand. A must read for screenwriters. Pilar’s book does give you the knowledge and confidence that you can do a lot in 10 minutes.

Friendly, no-nonsense advice from a lady who really knows what she's talking about. The ten-minute format is inspiring since it's an amount of time easy to authorize oneself and practical because of the focus and crap-cutting that it engenders. Pilar's relaxed attitude is liberating. To the cumulative side-effects of a stack of scriptwriting books I've read before it, a great remedy.

As an assigned textbook. Very clear and easy to follow.

First let me say I'm more interested in the craft of writing a TV pilot and this book seems to be more for feature film writers. I have a friend who LOVES this book, which is why I bought it. I don't like the sans serif type and the formatting of the pages...too many words on the page and the exercises, for me, are hard to follow. But maybe it's just me.For TV pilots, I like William Rabkin's book as well as Daniel P. Calvisi's STORY MAPS: TV DRAMA: THE STRUCTURE OF THE ONE-HOUR TELEVISION PILOT.But you can get something from an assortment of instructive books, right?

Very educational and full of useful, helpful or relevant tips!

Sensacional! Ótimos exercícios para quem quer colocar a mãe na massa. Ou para ser mais exato, no teclado.

The only thing I regret is that I couldn't get this book in print in my country and had to go for the ebook. This is the right choice for writers who enjoy plotting the playful way.

Fantastic book full of useful resources and exercises. Couldn’t recommend it enough.

I can heartily recommend this book. I was looking for a way to take a bunch of nebulous ideas and apply screenwriting 'craft' to these, to give the necessary structure to my story and backgrounds/desires to my characters. I have only 20 minutes a day to write - on my train journey home from my work each day.The book forces you to think about some of the most important aspects of your characters (what do they want, what do they have to overcome etc.) along with plot essentials such as conflict. It took me through a number of exercises that not only help me put structure around the characters and story line as I already envisaged them but also elicited further creativity by forcing me to consider and answer certain questions that I hadn't yet considered. This gave me many more options for how my film could evolve while giving me confidence that I was hitting the right notes and pace to make the script ultimately marketable.What this book won't give you (not to a great level of detail) is everything you need to know about formatting your script (and this is not a criticism as it is not what the book sets out to achieve). There are established paradigms in Hollywood for how scripts should be formatted and it is important to know and practice these so that your script doesn't rejected before the content has even been digested. For this I highly recommend "The Hollywood Standard" by Christopher Riley - also available here on Amazon.