Crafting Short Screenplays That Connect

Crafting Short Screenplays That Connect, Fifth Edition, stands alone among screenwriting books by emphasizing that human connection, though often overlooked, is as essential to writing effective screenplays as conflict. This ground-breaking book will show you how to advance and deepen your screenwriting skills, increasing your ability to write richer, more resonant short screenplays that will connect with your audience.

Award-winning writer and director Claudia Hunter Johnson teaches you the all-important basics of dramatic technique and guides you through the challenging craft of writing short screenplays with carefully focused exercises of increasing length and complexity. In completing these exercises and applying Johnson’s techniques and insights to your own work, you will learn how to think more deeply about the screenwriter’s purpose, craft effective patterns of human change, and strengthen your storytelling skills.

This 20th Anniversary Edition features 11 short screenplays, including Academy Award winning Barry Jenkins' (Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk) luminous short film, My Josephine, and an accompanying companion website that features the completed films and additional screenplay examples. The book has also been expanded and updated to include two new award-winning screenplays Killer Kart and The Great Wall of Vicky Lynn. and a brand-new chapter exploring the use of genre in the short film. An absolute must-have resource for students of screenwriting.

Claudia Hunter Johnson is the writer/director of the civil rights documentary feature, The Other Side of Silence: The Untold Story of Ruby McCollum, winner of the Gold Jury Prize at Seattle’s Social Justice Film Festival and Best Florida Documentary at the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival. She is also the author of two memoirs, Stifled Laughter―nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the inaugural P.E.N./Newman’s Own First Amendment Award―and Hurtling Toward Happiness: A Mother and Teenage Son’s Road Trip From Blues to Bonding in a Really Small Car. She has taught screenwriting at the FSU Film School and the Writing for Screen & Television Division at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts.