This torturous video (really, click only if your love of music is strong enough to survive this assault) illustrates a point I often try to make about screenwriting books (really, bear with me). While there is great insight and clarity offered by many books out there, it is entirely possible, and in fact incredibly common, to check every item off the list of what the book is telling you to do in terms of practical technique, and you still end up with the screenwriting equivalent of something hideous like this song and video – which you can see is doing everything the successful acts in the genre were doing at the time, just horribly. I can’t tell you how many movies I see that effectively play in my mind as the two-hour equivalent of this.
As with any creative expression, what makes great writing great comes from somewhere else, and that thing has to compel and help guide you along with whatever advice you find. Seek wisdom wherever you can, by all means, but then make it work with whatever’s driving you to write to begin with.