Dear Chadwick:
if your interest is in learning how to write script coverage at a professional level, you should know that Dramatica’s “Coverage” function will give you about 200 times more material than you will ever need for the typical coverage report. I’ve written TONS of professional coverage, and the longest piece they EVER wanted from me was five pages (two pages was the more-typical expectation).
I can send you some of my sample coverages, but I recommend you first do a Google search for “writing professional coverage.” You’ll initially note lots of listings for your “professional coverage” competitors (there are lots of them, with many years of experience). But if you keep digging down, you will definitely find several helpful blogs written by script analysts or producers.
Or you can look up “writing script coverage” on Amazon.com; there’s a few helpful listings there. And look around on LinkedIn.com or other forum groups, and follow the Tweets of the BitterReader. And read the blogs at ScriptShadow.net. They’re not exactly “coverage,” but they do include script summaries and reader notes.
Overall, I’d say it’s better to learn Dramatica to build your own story-crafting abilities, not as a coverage help. Because the vast majority of spec scripts submitted to Hollywood cannot seriously withstand even the first rank of Dramatica questions, much less the more in-depth stuff.
And for a producer who just wants a real quick “take” on whether he received any scripts worth reading this week, a script analyst who writes overlong restructuring notes in “Dramatica-speak” will just frustrate and overload him.
That’s my take, because I learned Dramatica while writing years of coverage, and generally found my analyses had to be simple and use common Hollywood story jargon (rather than Dramatica terms), or the busy, cut-and-dried producer didn’t want any more of me. Just sayin’…
