By Pilar Alessandra

She also runs classes in the USA for screenwriters and I've always been pretty envious because, to my knowledge, she's only ever taught over here once and I damned well missed it! So anyway, when this book, The Coffee Break Screenwriter: Writing Your Script 10 Minutes At A Time dropped onto the mat I was really looking forward to it and I have to say from the get-go that it doesn't disappoint.

Pilar's big thing is the 10-minute exercise. She maintains that, as busy folks with jobs and lives, getting long periods of time to focus on our writing is difficult, but if we can arrange 10 minutes of focused attention on a topic we can do anything, and that's how this book is set up. Chapter by chapter, it takes you through the process of writing your screenplay, from idea to premise and then on through structure, outline, creating characters and crafting scenes, constantly building until you end up with written pages and a first draft.

Now while that's where a lot of screenwriting books stop, she then takes you back through several passes where you re-write your screenplay focusing on different elements to improve the work. First she takes you through improving the concept, then the structure, a character pass, a dialogue pass, a scene pass and so on - there's a lot here - until you have a very tight draft for your final edit where we trim and cut and tighten to get things right. Finally she talks about presentation, marketing your work, opportunities and the business side of things.

Now this may sound daunting but it's really nicely written, the tone is friendly and easy going and the lessons are simple to grasp so that when you hit the 'Take Ten' exercise, the brief is so tight that you can get straight down to work and get a lot done - which is the point, after all.

If you've read lots of screenwriting books - and I have - then there will be some stuff in there that you'll have covered before but Pilar's take is mostly pretty fresh, very comprehensive and anyway it never hurts to brush up on the basics, but even then, there's some stuff in there like finding the 'game' in the dialogue that I'd never come across before and was worth the cover price alone.

I expected a lot from The Coffee Break Screenwriter and it didn't disappoint, instantly leaping into my top 5 of favourite screenwriting books. Due out in October here in the UK you'd do well to get your pre-order in now and when it turns up and you've gotten your movie idea out of your head and onto the page you'll be very pleased you did.

The Coffee Break Screenwriter is published by Michael Wiese Books and is available from Amazon, Blackwell and all good book stores.

Pilar's excellent podcast is called On The Page Screenwriting and is available for free from iTunes and her accompanying website can be found here. She also