Unlike most how-to books on screenwriting, Writing in Pictures is highly practical, offering a realistic guide to the screenwriting profession, as well as concrete practical guidance in the steps professional writers take to write a screenplay that comes from the heart instead of the pocketbook. The readeris taken through the nitty-gritty process of conceiving, outlining, constructing, and writing a screenplay in the professional format, with clear and concise examples offered for every step in writing a short dramatic film.

Writing in Pictures offers straight talk, no mumbo-jumbo or gimmicks, just a methodical, step-by-step process that walks the reader through the different stages of writing a screenplay -- from idea to outline to character biography to treatment to step outline to finished screenplay.

Using well-known films and screenplays, both contemporary and classic, to illustrate its lessons, Writing in Pictures also offers comments from famous screenwriters past and present and insightful stories (often colorful and funny) that illuminate aspects of the craft.

Joseph McBride is a film historian and associate professor in the Cinema department at San Francisco State University.
His many books include Searching for JohnFord, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success, Steven Spielberg: A Biography, Hawks on Hawks, Whatever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career, as well as the critical studies John Ford (1974, with Michael Wilmington) and Orson Welles.