Three Uses Of The Knife, by David Mamet

"On the nature and purpose of drama"

My god this is good, this guy is a @£$@ing master. I have never highlighted so much of a book in my life (though, you know, experience shows I will never go back to those highlights, and have no idea what they say).

This book is about (among other things) three-act structures in drama, and is structured as three long chapters, and (without having noticed it exactly at the time) I will bet money that the three chapters are exactly designed to match Mamet's concepts of how drama works. At one point towards the end he discusses the "montage" in rom-coms, and how it maps on to the "soliloquy" that always used to show up at the start of the third act in drama, how they're kind of out-of-place and out-of-nowhere and a sign that the author is bored of herself (because she knows what will happen through to the end of the play, now, and is almost thinking "are you really going to make me write this all out for you?), and suddenly I was like OH SHIT WE'RE AT THE START OF THE THIRD ACT OF THIS BOOK, YOU F@£$CKER, it was so well done and so spot-on.

Mamet! Hell yeah.

I should probably read this book again, and if so you might get more notes here, but if you're reading this I didn't do that, and you should just go read it yourself.