CREATIVE SCREENWRITING: Understanding Emotional Structure by Christina Kallas

This is not a sexy book.  Even just by looking at the cover, there is nothing seemingly attractive or 'good' about this book.  It's filled with dense paragraphs, no pictures or illustrations or graphs, there is no humour or ironic phrasing to put you more at ease, and the opening chapter starts with a detailed observation of Aristotlean writing, including some quotes in Greek.


I tried to read that damn first chapter more than a dozen times.  And every time, it felt like more gibberish was piling in my already over-burdened mind.

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But after 2 years of it sitting on my shelf, collecting dust, I was about to throw it out when I randomly opened it somewhere towards the back, and was immediately engrossed in the author's analysis of the ending of the chapter.  She includes numerous exercises, (admittedly I haven't done half of them), but the other half that I took the time to work on really opened my flow of creativity.
This woman knows what she's talking about.


As the ideas and exercises are built up on the preceding chapters, I found myself going back a few pages, then a few more, then a few more, until I decided this was ridiculous and went back to the beginning.
I still can't digest her Aristotlean musings, but the rest of the book, although grey, and densely packed with information, detailed analyses of produced films, and possible interprétations, is fascinating.


This is definitely not for a beginner screenwriter: but if you have a few thousand pages under your belt, I HIGHLY recommend this book to broaden your horizons.