John August, Craig Mazin On Turning ‘Scriptnotes’ Podcast Into A Book

If you’re going to buy one book on screenwriting, then you should probably make it Scriptnotes by John August and Craig Mazin.

Based on the duo’s long-running podcast of the same name, the 352-page tome (now on sale from Crown Publishing Group) delivers a unique insider’s look at Holllywood scriptwriting with input from seasoned creatives working at the industry’s highest levels.

“It’s not just a nuts and bolts how-do-I-write-a-screenplay? book,” said Mazin, known for his acclaimed work on HBO’s Chernobyl and The Last of Us. “It’s also a slice of life book. You get to hear from professionals at the very top of our business. You see how human they are and hear about how they were in your position when you needed a screenplay book and were trying to figure out what to do … It’s not how to write a screenplay. It’s how to be a screenwriter, and that’s a different thing.”

“We’ve successfully de-glamorized parts of the process,” added August, writer of several Tim Burton movies (including Big Fish and Frankenweenie). “We actually talked about how difficult it is, how frustrating it can be. I think the interview chapters we have with all these very successful filmmakers and TV writers along the way show that it’s just a lot of hard work. That [even] Christopher Nolan is still struggling to write.”

The biggest challenge of putting the book together was figuring out how to turn 600 podcast episodes into “a condensed compendium collection of the the topics that we talk about on the show, explained August.

“The book is sort of that distilled version of it. If you did listen to the whole podcast, this is most of what you would have gotten and hopefully, it’s in the same spirit as what the conversation would be like … It should feel like trusted uncles talking through what it’s like to be a screenwriter. That’s the tone we were going for.”

“It’s just a really well-curated book,” echoed Mazin. “I wish I’d had it when I started out. That would have been really nice.”

Scriptnotes takes the opposite approach of “iconic” screenwriting volumes, many of which “are written not by folks who actually do that work, but by people who read screenplays and noticed the patterns in them,” August continued. ”And sure, there are patterns in screenplays. Things tend to have a beginning, middle, and end. But it becomes this formula for reproducing a very classic, boring form of entertainment—and that’s what we were pushing back against.”

“What we try to do is talk about the psychology of drama,” Mazin elaborated. “Why we like drama in the first place and how we can create it in ways that are interesting.”

Among the biggest lessons explored in the book is the crucial difference between “mystery and confusion.” The former, Mazin noted, “is such an important part of drama”—whether or not you’re telling an overt mystery story. “In any movie, in any moment, there are often little mysteries. Who’s that? Why did [they] react that way? Where are we going? That’s intentional and orchestrated by the screenwriter, the way a magician orchestrates mystery when they’re doing tricks.”

Confusion, on the other hand, is the flip side of mystery, “when you’re not trying to have the audience wonder about something, but they are,” Mazin said, “which means you didn’t quite do your job right.”

Scriptnotes also pushes back against the traditional conversation regarding structure, which is usually described as “this mystical thing that has to be done to your screenplay,” August said.

“Everything you write is going to have a structure. It’s just a question of, ‘Is that structure successful for what you’re trying to do?’ There’s going to be a sequence of events and are those sequence of events leading the audience to the right conclusions and payoffs that you’re looking for? You have to find a structure that works for your story and not impose it upon your story.”

While the rise of AI is a major point of contention throughout the industry today, the co-authors decided to steer clear of the topic in order to keep the book more “timeless,” August shared. “To me, that is the area I’m sort of least concerned about. Because even as these systems get better at stringing words together, they won’t get better at being human beings.”

“Screenwriters are making a weird Rosetta Stone, where we go from unheard and unseen thought, to text, to seen and heard thought,” Mazin concurred. “Language models just have language. They just have the middle part. But I do think it was smart to not talk too much about this, because when the AI bubble collapses, I don’t want our book to be like, ‘Oh, that was obviously written right before or the bubble collapsed.’”

When it comes to screenwriting, there’s no need to look to the future because screenplays are like the horseshoe crabs of the cinematic medium. That is to say they have remained relatively unchanged since the production of Casablanca in the early 1940s. Indeed, they may be the only fixed element of the entire industry.

“At some point we’re going to be hitting 100 years of screenplays being exactly the same in terms of their format, which means it works,” mused Mazin. “So the format, the method is simple. It works. The problem is, ‘What do you put into it?’ And that’s always been the problem. That’s what we try and help people suss out for themselves. A lot of the book challenges people to ask questions like, ‘How do people really talk to each other? How do we sound when we’re upset? Why do people lie and what are the different kinds of lies?’ What are the different conflicts that people can get into?’ All these things that you would need to know.”

In addition to being anchored in time-tested methods, screenwriting is also an egalitarian exercise.

“You don’t even need software and there’s free screenwriting software if you want it,” Mazin concluded. “Anyone can sit down and do it at any time. There’s no access required, no machinery required, no fees. It is the only part of our very gatekeep-y business that anyone can do. Therefore, it is tempting for anyone to try. I sincerely hope that there are some people out there who have a great screenwriter within them who will pick up this book and be encouraged to try. Because even though it seems like Hollywood is just not interested in reading anyone’s script, they are desperately interested in reading a good script. That, they want.”