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Scriptnotes: A Book About Screenwriting and Things That Are Interesting to Screenwriters
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The ultimate guide to writing a great screenplay and building a screenwriting career, from the creators of the hit podcast Scriptnotes—featuring contributions from film and TV legends Christopher Nolan, Greta Gerwig, Michael Schur, Rian Johnson, Aline Brosh McKenna, Ashley Nicole Black, Seth Rogen, and many more.
With decades of Hollywood experience, John August and Craig Mazin know what it takes to write a successful script for the screen. And over the past twelve years, they’ve analyzed generation-defining movies and shared their wisdom on their popular podcast Scriptnotes, inviting experts in the craft to discuss everything that makes a script shine.
Now, in their first book, August and Mazin draw on more than a thousand hours of Scriptnotes conversations, as well as their own storied careers, to help readers begin, refine, and sell their own scripts. Part writing class, part informational interview with the best creators in the business, this essential book shares tips
• The Basics—including the rules of screenwriting and when to break them
• The Craft—including how to create a compelling story with captivating protagonists, worthy antagonists, and a sound structure
• The Business—including how to pitch a script and the do’s (and don’ts) of working collaboratively on a project
Perfect for screenwriters, film buffs, and anyone who enjoys analysis of iconic movies like Die Hard, this one-of-a-kind resource provides exclusive access to the screenwriting process—and will inspire anyone ready to pen their own successful screenplay.
With decades of Hollywood experience, John August and Craig Mazin know what it takes to write a successful script for the screen. And over the past twelve years, they’ve analyzed generation-defining movies and shared their wisdom on their popular podcast Scriptnotes, inviting experts in the craft to discuss everything that makes a script shine.
Now, in their first book, August and Mazin draw on more than a thousand hours of Scriptnotes conversations, as well as their own storied careers, to help readers begin, refine, and sell their own scripts. Part writing class, part informational interview with the best creators in the business, this essential book shares tips
• The Basics—including the rules of screenwriting and when to break them
• The Craft—including how to create a compelling story with captivating protagonists, worthy antagonists, and a sound structure
• The Business—including how to pitch a script and the do’s (and don’ts) of working collaboratively on a project
Perfect for screenwriters, film buffs, and anyone who enjoys analysis of iconic movies like Die Hard, this one-of-a-kind resource provides exclusive access to the screenwriting process—and will inspire anyone ready to pen their own successful screenplay.
- GenresWritingFilmNonfiction
327 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 5, 2025
73 people are currently reading
225 people want to read
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December 6, 2025Sam Esmail edited porn for a living in the San Fernando Valley before his big break. Lulu Wang got fired from being a PA off Pineapple Express. Justin Simien had to crowdfund the entire beginning of his career because nobody wanted to fund a “talk-y” movie. Lorene Scafaria says to write a spec first instead of pitching your idea.Greta Gerwig got the idea for Little Women when moving out of her apartment, and finding a copy of the book in storage.
Mike Schur quit SNL, studied metaphysics and philosophy to write The Good Place, an idea that sprung solely from the interest of exploring what’s “good” and what’s “bad”. Rian Johnson says to just pick up a camera, and practice shooting and editing. Harmony Korine says so too, even though he’s definitely not featured in this book.
There are also screenwriters in this book who have careers impossible to emulate at this point in the history of the industry: Christopher Nolan, Lawrence Kasdan, Eric Roth, David Koepp, and Christopher McQuarrie.
But across the board, whether a modern or screenwriter of yore, all of them say something to the effect of — just do, make something, and focus on the making and doing.
At the end of the day, it’s not screenwriting books, or formulas that made the creative outputs of Hollywood interesting, it was well, creativity. It’s not algorithms, rules. This book knows very well that there are no rules, and starts off saying as much.
What makes movies interesting are constellations of really weird personalities, an unregulated, unfair industry, tons of collaboration, years of wild excess that now seems to be slipping away… and lots and lots of cocaine seems to have helped, though I’m sure they all take adderall now.
Mike Schur quit SNL, studied metaphysics and philosophy to write The Good Place, an idea that sprung solely from the interest of exploring what’s “good” and what’s “bad”. Rian Johnson says to just pick up a camera, and practice shooting and editing. Harmony Korine says so too, even though he’s definitely not featured in this book.
There are also screenwriters in this book who have careers impossible to emulate at this point in the history of the industry: Christopher Nolan, Lawrence Kasdan, Eric Roth, David Koepp, and Christopher McQuarrie.
But across the board, whether a modern or screenwriter of yore, all of them say something to the effect of — just do, make something, and focus on the making and doing.
At the end of the day, it’s not screenwriting books, or formulas that made the creative outputs of Hollywood interesting, it was well, creativity. It’s not algorithms, rules. This book knows very well that there are no rules, and starts off saying as much.
What makes movies interesting are constellations of really weird personalities, an unregulated, unfair industry, tons of collaboration, years of wild excess that now seems to be slipping away… and lots and lots of cocaine seems to have helped, though I’m sure they all take adderall now.
December 4, 2025
I’m not done with this book yet and if my opinion changes I’ll update my rating (doubtful). But so far, this book is the best one I’ve read about screenwriting. I have read maybe a dozen books on the subject, listened to four or five other podcasts (none can hold a candle to scriptnotes) and I studied screenwriting heavily in college. I’ve had several screenwriting coaches and now I’m producing my first film. I’ve waded through the fear mongering and control that most amateur writers play in daily and can tell you to stop listening to others who are trying to make it and only listen to those who have done it. This book is a warm cup of tea on a dark night, encouraging you to feel safe to learn and be yourself as a writer.
December 31, 2025
In an era when “how-to” books proliferate like apps – each promising an optimized you, each selling a shortcut to mastery – “Scriptnotes: A Book About Screenwriting and Things That Are Interesting to Screenwriters” arrives with an almost old-fashioned confidence: not in rules, but in work. John August and Craig Mazin have spent years translating the daily weather of professional writing into conversation – the micro-meteorology of drafts, meetings, notes, deadlines, and the strange mixture of solitude and committee that turns a screenplay into a film. Their book is less a manifesto than a long, clear look through a window: what writing looks like when it is not a dream but a job, and what it costs to keep doing it.
The title is chatty on purpose. It’s a hedge against reverence, and a warning against the sanctimony that clings to most craft advice. August and Mazin refuse the preacher’s posture. They do not promise that a script will sell, or that a writer will be discovered, or that the algorithm will favor you if you click in the right places. Instead they offer something rarer: a taxonomy of what matters, grounded in practice, and delivered with a tone that assumes you are capable of thinking. The book’s generosity is not that it is kind – though it often is – but that it treats the reader as an adult, someone who can tolerate complexity, contradiction, and the unglamorous truth that artistry is frequently indistinguishable from persistence.
Many screenwriting guides begin with structure because structure is the one thing a book can diagram. But “Scriptnotes” begins with the page – with the humble problem of scene description, those blocks of text that are supposed to become images and sound. The authors’ insistence is bracing: you are not writing literature; you are writing instructions for a movie to exist in someone else’s mind. This is not a call to austerity, exactly. It’s an argument for authority. If you describe what matters, if you control pacing and attention, if you give the reader a clear film to watch while they read, you earn trust. The chapter feels like a small corrective to the internet’s endless fascination with formatting trivia. It places the emphasis where it belongs: on the reader’s experience, on clarity as a form of respect, on specificity as an ethical act.
From there the book moves through familiar craft territory – dialogue, character, theme, genre, worldbuilding – but it does so with a steady refusal to reduce. Dialogue is not a showcase for cleverness. Character is not a biography. Theme is not a moral pinned to the end like a ribbon. Genre is not a cage but a contract. Worldbuilding is not a database of lore but a system of rules whose consistency allows the audience to believe consequences. None of this is new as an idea, and yet it feels newly expressed, partly because August and Mazin speak from the inside of professional constraints. They know what it means to write under pressure, to explain a story to non-writers, to cut something you love because it slows the film, to make a character legible with one gesture rather than a paragraph of psychologizing.
What distinguishes “Scriptnotes” from most of its peers is not any single insight but the shape of its attention. It’s not only about the writing of scripts; it’s about the life that produces them. The middle chapters – rewriting, notes, pitching, representation – are where the book becomes something more than a craft manual. These sections are as much about temperament as technique. Rewriting is framed as the true writing, the moment when a draft stops being a wish and becomes a choice. Notes are treated not as commandments but as data – imperfect, sometimes political, often emotional – that must be interpreted rather than obeyed. Pitching is described as an invitation to imagine, not a recitation of plot. Representation is demystified into readiness and momentum, a partnership that responds to a career rather than conjuring one.
The effect is to strip away the romantic narrative that causes so many writers to suffer unnecessarily. The book keeps insisting, in various keys, that the industry is not a meritocracy and not a conspiracy. It is an ecosystem, messy and human, governed by taste, fear, budgets, timing, relationships, and luck. This realism could curdle into cynicism, but it doesn’t. The authors are too committed to the work itself, to the stubborn belief that craft matters even in a world that often fails to reward it.
If the book has a quiet villain, it is a certain kind of magical thinking – the belief that there is a right formula that will spare you from uncertainty. Here “Scriptnotes” stands in instructive contrast to books like “Save the Cat!”, whose immense usefulness is also its seduction: it offers a map, and maps comfort us. August and Mazin are not anti-map, exactly. They acknowledge structure, genre expectation, the necessity of clarity. But they keep returning to judgment, to intention, to the fundamental truth that the same technique can be brilliant in one story and disastrous in another. The book is not interested in turning you into a compliant producer of content; it is interested in turning you into a writer who can make choices and live with them.
That emphasis on judgment is what gives the book its adult tone. It is closer, in spirit, to “Adventures in the Screen Trade” than to the template-driven guides that dominate workshop culture. Like William Goldman, August and Mazin understand that honesty is itself a form of instruction. It is also, oddly, closer to the lineage of “Bird by Bird” and “On Writing” than one might expect from a Hollywood craft book. Those books are not just about sentences; they are about the temperament required to keep returning to the desk. “Scriptnotes” joins that company in its later chapters, where it addresses working, success, failure, longevity, and voice – words that sound self-help adjacent until you see how unsentimental the authors are about them.
Their chapter on success is among the most useful precisely because it refuses triumphalism. Success, they argue, doesn’t solve the problems you think it will; it merely replaces them. The goalposts move. Comparison scales. External validation remains unstable. This is a perspective that feels particularly resonant now, in a culture that confuses visibility with value and treats attention as a proxy for meaning. For writers, the distortions are acute. The book’s refusal to mythologize is a quiet kindness. It offers a way to stay sane.
The chapter on failure is the book’s necessary companion to the chapter on success. Failure here is not a personal verdict but a structural feature of creative work in an industry. Projects collapse. Scripts don’t sell. Films are misunderstood. This is not tragedy; it is weather. The crucial point is not to pretend failure doesn’t hurt but to avoid turning it into identity. Careers end not because writers fail but because they stop writing after failure. It’s an old truth, but it lands with force because it’s delivered without performative encouragement. The book does not cheerlead. It simply tells the truth and lets the truth do its work.
If “Scriptnotes” is shaped by anything beyond lived experience, it is shaped by its origin in public conversation. That has advantages. The prose is lucid and companionable, with the rhythm of spoken intelligence. It is not trying to be literary; it is trying to be legible. The examples feel chosen for clarity rather than cleverness. The tone is a blend of warmth and exactness, with occasional flashes of dryness. There is also a certain repetition, the kind that comes when ideas have been tested over time with thousands of listeners. A few themes return like motifs: authority, clarity, trust, the danger of over-explaining. In a less disciplined book, this would feel padded. Here it feels like reinforcement – a chorus line in a song you’re meant to remember.
The book’s timeliness is subtle but real. Even in its most evergreen sections, it is shadowed by the present. It addresses, explicitly, the changed landscape of pitching – the normalization of Zoom rooms, the new etiquette of persuasion in a world where presence is pixelated. It speaks to the way social media can function as a rapid early-warning system for culture, how writers track what’s coming before it becomes “news.” And it cannot help but echo the larger anxieties of the moment around labor and authorship. The book’s explicit prohibition against being used to train AI systems reads less like boilerplate than a flare fired into a foggy future – a reminder that creative work is not simply content, and that the ownership of voice is now a contested terrain.
If there is a limitation, it is the limitation of perspective. The book is deeply grounded in Hollywood’s ecosystem – its guilds, its rooms, its development culture, its assumptions about what a writing career looks like. It is generous about that world, and often skeptical of its injustices, but it is still writing from the inside. Writers outside that system will find much that is transferable – the craft chapters especially – but may also feel the gravitational pull of a particular industry as the implicit model of legitimacy. The book is less a global guide to storytelling than a precise description of one powerful machine. To its credit, it never pretends otherwise.
The other limitation is more stylistic: its virtue is its restraint, and restraint can sometimes feel like a ceiling. This is not a book that revels in the strange pleasures of language. It does not make the page sing. It is not “Letters to a Young Poet.” Its beauty is a different kind: clarity as music, pragmatism as grace. That may be exactly what many readers need. But it also means that the book’s most poetic moments are philosophical rather than verbal. The poetry is in its worldview: the insistence that writing is a practice, that meaning is built over time, that no amount of success eliminates the need to return to the work.
Perhaps the book’s greatest achievement is that it refuses to end with a conversion narrative. Its concluding sections do not offer a triumphant summation. They offer something closer to companionship. By the time it reaches its later chapters, the book has ceased to be merely a guide and become a mirror: it reflects back the reader’s relationship to writing, with its ambitions and humiliations, its joys and resentments, its desire for recognition and its hunger for private meaning. In the end, the authors ask not how to “make it” but why to keep doing it. They do not offer a sentimental answer. They offer the only answer that can sustain a life: because writing helps us live more attentively inside experience, even when no one is watching.
As a book, “Scriptnotes” is both contemporary and oddly timeless. It belongs to the lineage of professional demystifiers – Goldman, Lumet – and to the lineage of writers who treat craft as a form of sanity – King, Lamott. It will be read, inevitably, by aspiring screenwriters looking for entry and by working writers looking for reorientation, and it will likely serve both. Its greatest utility may be for the middle group, the writers who have tried the formulas and found that formulas cannot carry them through the long middle of a career, where the questions are less about where to put the inciting incident and more about how to survive the months when nothing happens.
If the book were only a collection of smart advice, it would be worth reading. But it is more than that. It is a sustained argument for a particular stance toward writing: clear-eyed, unsentimental, collaborative, and stubbornly hopeful without being naïve. It teaches craft, yes, but it also teaches a kind of moral posture: respect the reader, tell the truth, don’t over-explain, don’t romanticize suffering, don’t confuse success with meaning, and keep going. In a culture addicted to hacks and outcomes, that posture feels quietly radical.
The rating, if one insists on the reductive arithmetic of criticism, lands at 89 out of 100 – not because the book is flawless, but because it is unusually honest and unusually usable, a guide that does not infantilize its reader or lie about the world. It is the rare craft book that does what it says a screenplay should do: it makes you see the movie. More importantly, it makes you see the life around the movie – the actual life where writing happens, again and again, in rooms and alone, in triumph and disappointment, with other people and with yourself.
The title is chatty on purpose. It’s a hedge against reverence, and a warning against the sanctimony that clings to most craft advice. August and Mazin refuse the preacher’s posture. They do not promise that a script will sell, or that a writer will be discovered, or that the algorithm will favor you if you click in the right places. Instead they offer something rarer: a taxonomy of what matters, grounded in practice, and delivered with a tone that assumes you are capable of thinking. The book’s generosity is not that it is kind – though it often is – but that it treats the reader as an adult, someone who can tolerate complexity, contradiction, and the unglamorous truth that artistry is frequently indistinguishable from persistence.
Many screenwriting guides begin with structure because structure is the one thing a book can diagram. But “Scriptnotes” begins with the page – with the humble problem of scene description, those blocks of text that are supposed to become images and sound. The authors’ insistence is bracing: you are not writing literature; you are writing instructions for a movie to exist in someone else’s mind. This is not a call to austerity, exactly. It’s an argument for authority. If you describe what matters, if you control pacing and attention, if you give the reader a clear film to watch while they read, you earn trust. The chapter feels like a small corrective to the internet’s endless fascination with formatting trivia. It places the emphasis where it belongs: on the reader’s experience, on clarity as a form of respect, on specificity as an ethical act.
From there the book moves through familiar craft territory – dialogue, character, theme, genre, worldbuilding – but it does so with a steady refusal to reduce. Dialogue is not a showcase for cleverness. Character is not a biography. Theme is not a moral pinned to the end like a ribbon. Genre is not a cage but a contract. Worldbuilding is not a database of lore but a system of rules whose consistency allows the audience to believe consequences. None of this is new as an idea, and yet it feels newly expressed, partly because August and Mazin speak from the inside of professional constraints. They know what it means to write under pressure, to explain a story to non-writers, to cut something you love because it slows the film, to make a character legible with one gesture rather than a paragraph of psychologizing.
What distinguishes “Scriptnotes” from most of its peers is not any single insight but the shape of its attention. It’s not only about the writing of scripts; it’s about the life that produces them. The middle chapters – rewriting, notes, pitching, representation – are where the book becomes something more than a craft manual. These sections are as much about temperament as technique. Rewriting is framed as the true writing, the moment when a draft stops being a wish and becomes a choice. Notes are treated not as commandments but as data – imperfect, sometimes political, often emotional – that must be interpreted rather than obeyed. Pitching is described as an invitation to imagine, not a recitation of plot. Representation is demystified into readiness and momentum, a partnership that responds to a career rather than conjuring one.
The effect is to strip away the romantic narrative that causes so many writers to suffer unnecessarily. The book keeps insisting, in various keys, that the industry is not a meritocracy and not a conspiracy. It is an ecosystem, messy and human, governed by taste, fear, budgets, timing, relationships, and luck. This realism could curdle into cynicism, but it doesn’t. The authors are too committed to the work itself, to the stubborn belief that craft matters even in a world that often fails to reward it.
If the book has a quiet villain, it is a certain kind of magical thinking – the belief that there is a right formula that will spare you from uncertainty. Here “Scriptnotes” stands in instructive contrast to books like “Save the Cat!”, whose immense usefulness is also its seduction: it offers a map, and maps comfort us. August and Mazin are not anti-map, exactly. They acknowledge structure, genre expectation, the necessity of clarity. But they keep returning to judgment, to intention, to the fundamental truth that the same technique can be brilliant in one story and disastrous in another. The book is not interested in turning you into a compliant producer of content; it is interested in turning you into a writer who can make choices and live with them.
That emphasis on judgment is what gives the book its adult tone. It is closer, in spirit, to “Adventures in the Screen Trade” than to the template-driven guides that dominate workshop culture. Like William Goldman, August and Mazin understand that honesty is itself a form of instruction. It is also, oddly, closer to the lineage of “Bird by Bird” and “On Writing” than one might expect from a Hollywood craft book. Those books are not just about sentences; they are about the temperament required to keep returning to the desk. “Scriptnotes” joins that company in its later chapters, where it addresses working, success, failure, longevity, and voice – words that sound self-help adjacent until you see how unsentimental the authors are about them.
Their chapter on success is among the most useful precisely because it refuses triumphalism. Success, they argue, doesn’t solve the problems you think it will; it merely replaces them. The goalposts move. Comparison scales. External validation remains unstable. This is a perspective that feels particularly resonant now, in a culture that confuses visibility with value and treats attention as a proxy for meaning. For writers, the distortions are acute. The book’s refusal to mythologize is a quiet kindness. It offers a way to stay sane.
The chapter on failure is the book’s necessary companion to the chapter on success. Failure here is not a personal verdict but a structural feature of creative work in an industry. Projects collapse. Scripts don’t sell. Films are misunderstood. This is not tragedy; it is weather. The crucial point is not to pretend failure doesn’t hurt but to avoid turning it into identity. Careers end not because writers fail but because they stop writing after failure. It’s an old truth, but it lands with force because it’s delivered without performative encouragement. The book does not cheerlead. It simply tells the truth and lets the truth do its work.
If “Scriptnotes” is shaped by anything beyond lived experience, it is shaped by its origin in public conversation. That has advantages. The prose is lucid and companionable, with the rhythm of spoken intelligence. It is not trying to be literary; it is trying to be legible. The examples feel chosen for clarity rather than cleverness. The tone is a blend of warmth and exactness, with occasional flashes of dryness. There is also a certain repetition, the kind that comes when ideas have been tested over time with thousands of listeners. A few themes return like motifs: authority, clarity, trust, the danger of over-explaining. In a less disciplined book, this would feel padded. Here it feels like reinforcement – a chorus line in a song you’re meant to remember.
The book’s timeliness is subtle but real. Even in its most evergreen sections, it is shadowed by the present. It addresses, explicitly, the changed landscape of pitching – the normalization of Zoom rooms, the new etiquette of persuasion in a world where presence is pixelated. It speaks to the way social media can function as a rapid early-warning system for culture, how writers track what’s coming before it becomes “news.” And it cannot help but echo the larger anxieties of the moment around labor and authorship. The book’s explicit prohibition against being used to train AI systems reads less like boilerplate than a flare fired into a foggy future – a reminder that creative work is not simply content, and that the ownership of voice is now a contested terrain.
If there is a limitation, it is the limitation of perspective. The book is deeply grounded in Hollywood’s ecosystem – its guilds, its rooms, its development culture, its assumptions about what a writing career looks like. It is generous about that world, and often skeptical of its injustices, but it is still writing from the inside. Writers outside that system will find much that is transferable – the craft chapters especially – but may also feel the gravitational pull of a particular industry as the implicit model of legitimacy. The book is less a global guide to storytelling than a precise description of one powerful machine. To its credit, it never pretends otherwise.
The other limitation is more stylistic: its virtue is its restraint, and restraint can sometimes feel like a ceiling. This is not a book that revels in the strange pleasures of language. It does not make the page sing. It is not “Letters to a Young Poet.” Its beauty is a different kind: clarity as music, pragmatism as grace. That may be exactly what many readers need. But it also means that the book’s most poetic moments are philosophical rather than verbal. The poetry is in its worldview: the insistence that writing is a practice, that meaning is built over time, that no amount of success eliminates the need to return to the work.
Perhaps the book’s greatest achievement is that it refuses to end with a conversion narrative. Its concluding sections do not offer a triumphant summation. They offer something closer to companionship. By the time it reaches its later chapters, the book has ceased to be merely a guide and become a mirror: it reflects back the reader’s relationship to writing, with its ambitions and humiliations, its joys and resentments, its desire for recognition and its hunger for private meaning. In the end, the authors ask not how to “make it” but why to keep doing it. They do not offer a sentimental answer. They offer the only answer that can sustain a life: because writing helps us live more attentively inside experience, even when no one is watching.
As a book, “Scriptnotes” is both contemporary and oddly timeless. It belongs to the lineage of professional demystifiers – Goldman, Lumet – and to the lineage of writers who treat craft as a form of sanity – King, Lamott. It will be read, inevitably, by aspiring screenwriters looking for entry and by working writers looking for reorientation, and it will likely serve both. Its greatest utility may be for the middle group, the writers who have tried the formulas and found that formulas cannot carry them through the long middle of a career, where the questions are less about where to put the inciting incident and more about how to survive the months when nothing happens.
If the book were only a collection of smart advice, it would be worth reading. But it is more than that. It is a sustained argument for a particular stance toward writing: clear-eyed, unsentimental, collaborative, and stubbornly hopeful without being naïve. It teaches craft, yes, but it also teaches a kind of moral posture: respect the reader, tell the truth, don’t over-explain, don’t romanticize suffering, don’t confuse success with meaning, and keep going. In a culture addicted to hacks and outcomes, that posture feels quietly radical.
The rating, if one insists on the reductive arithmetic of criticism, lands at 89 out of 100 – not because the book is flawless, but because it is unusually honest and unusually usable, a guide that does not infantilize its reader or lie about the world. It is the rare craft book that does what it says a screenplay should do: it makes you see the movie. More importantly, it makes you see the life around the movie – the actual life where writing happens, again and again, in rooms and alone, in triumph and disappointment, with other people and with yourself.
December 19, 2025
The best book on writing I've read in a long time.
January 4, 2026
Could not love this book any more. Practical, but also thoroughly enjoyable.
December 27, 2025
I used to listen to podcasts a lot. Like, *a lot*. Then, in 2020, I switched to audiobooks and never looked back.
Scriptnotes is a podcast I used to listen to often. So, I was delighted to see that they condensed the show down into a 10-hour audiobook, so I could play some catch-up on the last 5 years of shows I missed.
For me, the highlights of this book were the 20-ish chapters hearing directly from guests of the show, all very accomplished screenwriters and directors. The book provides a collection of their greatest insights from their interviews, and I got something out of each one.
The other 20-ish chapters consist of screenwriting advice from John and Craig, which is also overall still insightful. I do think that it caters more toward beginning screenwriters than I would have liked, but there were still morsels of wisdom scattered throughout for writers of any experience level. It's got to be tough to balance advice in a book where your audience is probably a mix of beginners looking for a good screenwriting reference book, and longtime listeners of the show who are probably more experienced with the art form.
Scriptnotes is a podcast I used to listen to often. So, I was delighted to see that they condensed the show down into a 10-hour audiobook, so I could play some catch-up on the last 5 years of shows I missed.
For me, the highlights of this book were the 20-ish chapters hearing directly from guests of the show, all very accomplished screenwriters and directors. The book provides a collection of their greatest insights from their interviews, and I got something out of each one.
The other 20-ish chapters consist of screenwriting advice from John and Craig, which is also overall still insightful. I do think that it caters more toward beginning screenwriters than I would have liked, but there were still morsels of wisdom scattered throughout for writers of any experience level. It's got to be tough to balance advice in a book where your audience is probably a mix of beginners looking for a good screenwriting reference book, and longtime listeners of the show who are probably more experienced with the art form.
December 23, 2025
I'm a novelist, not a screenwriter, but this is the first, last, and really only book that a writer needs to understand the craft. Curated from the (incredible) podcast, it consolidates and highlights years of conversations about storytelling, writing, plot, character, and filmmaking.
John and Craig are not just master storytellers, but they're also master educators. Writing a good, compelling script takes practice, absolutely, but this book tells you how to do it. Over the years, they've hosted other screenwriters on the podcast to talk about their process, and several chapters feature those perspectives. The way the book is structured makes for an informative, but also entertaining read.
The authors have jokingly suggested that their book is well-suited for the bathroom, but on my shelf, it's right next to Stephen King's On Writing and Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird. And if an aspiring writer came over to my house and made me choose, I'd pick this one.
John and Craig are not just master storytellers, but they're also master educators. Writing a good, compelling script takes practice, absolutely, but this book tells you how to do it. Over the years, they've hosted other screenwriters on the podcast to talk about their process, and several chapters feature those perspectives. The way the book is structured makes for an informative, but also entertaining read.
The authors have jokingly suggested that their book is well-suited for the bathroom, but on my shelf, it's right next to Stephen King's On Writing and Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird. And if an aspiring writer came over to my house and made me choose, I'd pick this one.
August 27, 2025
Pre-ordered, not yet read. The Scriptnotes podcast, with THE keepers of the Script — Clarity John and Umbrage Craig hovering above my shoulders — is my constant companion on walks through Switzerland with my dog, Gandalf. Craig’s session, “How Craig Mazin Writes a Movie,” is teaching me to break my character’s soul, and I cannot wait to read this book threadbare.
December 22, 2025
The book reads super easily and is a faithful distillation of the podcast spirit.
It is for everyone, whatever your screenwriting level or even if you’re just curious about the craft.
The book equally made me reflect on my weak points and regrets as much as it inspired me to start writing my dream scripts.
I can already tell this is a book I will page through while working on future projects.
It is for everyone, whatever your screenwriting level or even if you’re just curious about the craft.
The book equally made me reflect on my weak points and regrets as much as it inspired me to start writing my dream scripts.
I can already tell this is a book I will page through while working on future projects.
December 30, 2025
Excellent guide from an excellent podcast. A true stand alone and not a transcript of their conversations. Lots of granular advice but interspersed with real world stories and examples. If you are just getting started on screenwriting or have written several, there is plenty here for you to chew on. Highly recommend.
December 31, 2025
Scriptnotes is the book every aspiring screenwriter needs
Craig and John cut through the glut of screenwriting books and gurus to show writers that writing is a fluid and flexible creative endeavor, not a rule-bound, "follow these steps" doctrine.
Read the book, listen to the podcast and learn.
Craig and John cut through the glut of screenwriting books and gurus to show writers that writing is a fluid and flexible creative endeavor, not a rule-bound, "follow these steps" doctrine.
Read the book, listen to the podcast and learn.
January 4, 2026
I'd recommend this for writers of fiction as well as scripts. The section on "Notes on Notes" is especially useful, giving advice on both taking and receiving criticism. And the "First Person" chapters of filmmakers' thoughts and processes is always entertaining regardless of how useful (or not useful) the advice actually is.
December 2, 2025
Amazing book! If you want to learn how to write, this is a good place to start!
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January 4, 2026The best screenwriting book I've read, because it isn't prescribing something but is instead talking about concepts. It's "tools not rules", to steal a phrase from Michael Arndt.
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