Book Review of Story Sense by Paul Lucey

Story Sense: Writing Story and Script for Feature Films and Television. Paul Lucey. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc, 1996. 398 pages

                                      By Patrick Charsky


    If you are looking for a textbook about Screenwriting, Paul Lucey’s Story Sense is the best. It contains everything a beginner might need as well as being an easy reference guide for advanced screenwriters. All screenwriters complain about getting stuck. Story Sense is a book that can help you get unstuck. Paul Lucey’s Story Sense is often overlooked as a great text about how to write screenplays. It should not be. It is one of the best books about the mechanics of writing a screenplay. With detailed explanations and lucid examples the book is the best in a market crammed with books that are long on promises of easy solutions or fortune and fame, but short on the hard work and struggle that goes into writing a screenplay.

Professor Lucey had a long and distinguished career as a Professor at UCLA, USC, and other schools. Story Sense is Dr. Lucey’s magnum opus gleaned from a long career writing for the industry and teaching. He has won several awards.

Why is Paul Lucey’s Story Sense overlooked? When I did internet searches about the best screenwriting books, I found that not one list had his book on it. Instead Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat and Writing Movies for Profit were on each list. These books get bad reviews of Amazon.com as they should. They are not the best books for screenwriters to read. In fact Writing Movies for Profit looks like a terrible book that shouldn’t be on anyone’s list of screenwriting books to read. I would advise screenwriters to avoid these books and read Story Sense.

Story Sense is structured like a textbook. It is very detailed in its explanations of a wide variety of topics important to writing screenplays. It covers things like kinds of stories; is it a Medea or a Faust? In addition Lucey writes about dramatic engines to keep your screenplay moving forward without losing the audience. Story Sense is not like Millard Kaufman’s Plots and Characters. It lacks humor and anecdotes that are so well used in Kaufman’s book on screenwriting. Story Sense is also unlike Syd Field’s book The Foundations of Screenwriting. Field uses mostly screenplay analysis to make his points. Lucey’s book is better as a textbook than both of these books. They lack the authority of Lucey’s book.

Lucey’s key film is The Verdict written by David Mamet. Lucey does an excellent job of showing how well written The Verdict screenplay is. In a scene study segment in the book, Lucey breaks down all the components of a scene. The dialogue, the setting, all the way until the end of the scene with Paul Newman standing alone, fighting against the legal hierarchy in Boston. In another example, Lucey breaks down why the conclusion of The Terminator is done so well. He makes obvious the repeated attempts to kill the machine. But the machine keeps coming back. It is the use of examples like these along with excellent analysis that makes Story Sense not only edifying, but also a pleasure to read.

The book does have some drawbacks. It is a textbook, so it lacks the informal style of books like Millard Kaufman’s Plots and Characters. Perhaps it is too schematic. Not enough creativity. Another negative is its film references have grown older. With the exception of Sleepless in Seattle, the other three study films are from the 1980’s. So a reader from the present might have trouble connecting with them because they were made in a different era.

Story Sense helped me to write two screenplays. I used it as a reference. It was easy to access and always had some advice, examples, and solutions about how to proceed to the next topic be it creating characters, stories engines, writing the second act, or coming up with a great conclusion. Story Sense is an underappreciated book about screenwriting.