Bill Johnson: 7 books

Bill Johnson reviews popular movies like Groundhog Day, Lethal Weapon, and Die Hard to set out principles of storytelling. Many writers new to screenwriting are doing what they think should be done. These reviews take new writers into the foundation of these films, exploring in a step by step...

Bill Johnson uses reviews of Romeo and Juliet, The Heidi Chronicles, Death of a Salesman, Hamlet, and The Iceman Cometh to teach the art and craft of writing powerful plays. Using these plays, he shows how new playwrights can learn the craft of writing for theater from masters of the stage. Bill...

In Reading To Write, a Novel Way to Write a Novel, Bill Johnson uses detailed reviews of the opening pages of popular novels to guide new writers to a deeper understanding of storytelling. The novels explored in this workbook include Catherine Hyde Ryan's Funeral for Horses, excerpts from Catcher...

Deep Characterization explores the difference between characters created to act out a story for an audience and characters created to act out a writer's internal dramas. A story writtenfor an audience is a promise to take that audience on a story journey; a story written for the writer's...

A Story is a Promise offers a clear, concise look into the mechanics of how to tell a story and how a story engages and rewards the attention of an audience. Examples are used from popular books, movies, and plays, including a scene by scene breakdown of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and reviews...

Spousal violence, or domestic violence as it is commonly referred to, is a social problem that occurs among people of all cultures, religious affiliations, sexual orientations and socioeconomic statuses. Although males and females are both reported as the perpetrators of domestic violence, males are...

The Combat Poets of Maya have had enough of the MiliTechs, bureaucrats genetically designed to manage the poets' chaotic lives. When the bureaucrats try to use an alien poet to force the combat poets to accept living under their control, the poets enlist the aid of a female warrior to set in motion...