Congratulations. You have successfully read a list of five writing tips cribbed from a book series about a man and his cat getting murdered by a talking train. The effort required to copy and paste quotes from Dungeon Crawler Carl and call it screenwriting advice is almost as impressive as the time Carl failed to use a fire extinguisher correctly. No Film School published a list of five screenwriting and storytelling tips extracted from Matt Dinniman's series, and the internet has decided this is news.
The piece pulls lines from the books and presents them as universal writing wisdom. Things like "kill your darlings" but with more explosions and a cat who demands better loot. This is not a groundbreaking analysis of narrative structure. It is a list of quotes that sound profound if you have never read a book about a man fighting a giant, sexually explicit goblin. For fans who have already read the series, this is a reminder that the rest of the world is only now catching up to what you already know. For writers, the takeaway is simple: if you want to be quoted by a film school website, write a scene where a cat negotiates a tax break.
This development sits awkwardly next to our recent coverage. We published a review of Book Six Review: The Eye of the Bedlam Bride Barely Worth Your Time that said the sixth book barely earns your time. Now a screenwriting outlet is treating the same author's offhand dialogue as a masterclass. The disconnect is obvious. One piece asks whether the story is even good, and the other assumes the story is good enough to teach from. You cannot have both. Either the series has structural lessons worth learning or it is a barely passable entry in a genre about talking cats. Pick one.
The timing also matters. We also ran a story about Jeff Hays to Voice Princess Donut in Show After Fan Demand and another where Audiobook Narrator Explains Why Princess Donut Is More Than a Joke. The show is being cast. The audiobook narrator is now the voice of the cat on screen. And the same week, a film school publishes writing tips from the source material. The machine is moving. The question nobody is asking is whether the screenwriting tips will matter when the actual show has to turn those tips into scenes that do not rely on a narrator describing what a cat is thinking. That is the test. No Film School gets to cherry-pick the good lines. The showrunner has to write the rest. Watch that gap.