Writers’ rooms can be a heaven or hell, depending on a few things. The best rooms foster inclusive and productive creative flow. The worst create a toxic stew of bad feelings and doubt. Both kinds and everything in between require basic knowledge of how the room works. These fundamentals are best learned before you go in. The mystery box of the writers’ room need not stay sealed shut forever. Consider this book your crowbar.

Do The Right Thing! offers screenwriting strategies that focus on diversity, equity and inclusion. These are the five film that are discussed: Moonlight, Get Out, Mudbound, Roma, and Always be My Maybe. The goal is to teach an already challenging writing mode that requires screenwriters to create complex human experiences through visual storytelling. We are in a critical historical moment where the importance of screenwriting can be of the utmost usefulness in the observation of racism, inequity and inclusion in all media. The screen representations of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality or class are not often explicitly addressed at the “front end” of the film production process, specifically, during the creation of the screenplay (whether original or adapted from outside source material). The idea is to introduce and reinforce the importance of accountability for what you write for the screen. This is not to limit the screenwriter’s creative impulses, but rather to create and engage them in consistent ways that reveal unconscious biases and instances of systemic racism. We will use five case studies of commercially successful and award-winning screenplays that resist stereotypes to present multidimensional depictions of historically underrepresented groups, such as LGBTQ, African American, Latino and Asian American. In the discussions of each individual screenplay issues such as the adaptation process, plot structure and devices, characterization, setting, symbolism, and genre conventions are introduced and analyzed in depth.

Becoming a director is not just about making a film, webseries, commercial, or music video. The opportunity to direct for television is not a given because you’ve successfully completed a project in another medium. Turning your passion into your profession requires the ability to make transitions at the exact moment a pivot is needed, with creativity and confidence. Chatmon’s book helps directors across all mediums shape their career with targeted anecdotes, worksheets, and other resources, all of which fall into three designated categories: How-To, Self-Help, and Inspiration.

A Sense of Dread features three main sections. 1) A detailed examination of the biological, psychological, and cultural bases of fear. What fears do we share with animals? What fears are uniquely human? What fears have we learned from our culture? From our families? From our experiences growing up? And what, exactly, is the difference between fear and dread? 2) A Sense of Dread then combines these ideas to explore the roots of human fear and apply them to storytelling for the screen. “The Toolbox of Dread” outlines the techniques for creating terror on the page. A wide array of horror subgenres are also explored, including why they exist, and what challenges each presents to the horror screenwriter. 3) Author Neal Marshall Stevens puts Theory into Practice, using examples from his own work to demonstrate how to apply his “toolbox” and the principles of “Dread” to put real scares into the pages of a screenplay. Finally, we seek to answer the question many people ask: What are you afraid of?

Editing for Directors guides directors through postproduction, starting with planning for editing during the shoot and ending with the completion of their film. This thorough, well-illustrated book: Describes the artistic, organizational, and technical skills editors bring to the party; Tells directors what to look for when hiring an editor and the best ways to work with an editor; Explains how and why directors should plan for editing before they shoot a frame; Devotes a full chapter to relating the history of editing and cutting tools and how they have affected the language of cinema and present-day editing; Defines and discusses cutting-room terms, practices, and workflows; Reveals how editors approach footage and put shows together; Details the postproduction process from dailies to director’s cut to locked cut; Covers creating and overseeing VFX (video effects); Demystifies spotting the show with the sound and music crew and creating, editing, and mixing sound and music; Describes titling, color grading, the DI (digital intermediate) process, and producing your show’s final deliverables; and Spells out ways to archive your show and why doing so matters.

To make compelling television, our industry depends on enthusiastic new voices with fresh ideas. While there are plenty of books about the mechanics of writing, this is the first time an insider has detailed the invaluable TV executive perspective.