by Tom Farr
Originally published at WhisperProject.net on April 13, 2015.
I first became interested in learning how to write a screenplay when I was in high school. I love the fact that all of the movies I love started out as something created by a writer. When I watched Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, I loved the movie so much that I immediately went and looked up the screenplay for it and began reading.
Many fiction writers love the idea of seeing their story turned into a movie. I’m often torn between whether I should write a story as a novel or a screenplay, and though I often go the novel or short story route because it gives me more control over the story, I love the idea of turning one of my stories into a script. In fact, I’ve written some short film scripts, and I’ve ghostwritten six screenplays.
How to Write a Screenplay: The Basics
I’ve learned a lot about how to write a screenplay in the past couple years, thanks largely to books published by Michael Wiese Productions, and here are the basics you need to know to write a screenplay.
1. Focus on Sights and Sounds
Screenwriting is about telling a certain type of story, one that is visual and in which the only things that are communicated are what you can film with a camera. This means inner thoughts and emotions are off-limits.
The old adage to “show; don’t tell” is never more true than it is for screenwriting. You’re going to be writing a story that will be turned into something people will watch and listen to. They’ll see the actions the characters take and hear the words they speak to one another.
If someone’s devastated by the loss of someone they love, you can only communicate it through visuals and dialogue. Show a woman crying as she stands next to the hospital bed of someone who has clearly passed away, and we know she’s sad because of what we’re seeing.
When we want to communicate a certain emotion, we have to ask ourselves how that emotion manifests itself externally? Does it make someone laugh, cry, punch a wall, kiss the person next to them?
When you’re learning how to write a screenplay, you want to make clever use of actions, facial expressions, gestures, and dialogue to communicate what people see on the screen and understand about what is happening.
Screenwriting is about creating an immersive experience for the viewer, and this is done by utilizing sights and sounds in the process as much as possible.
2. Get it Right Before You Write
When it comes to screenwriting, the story rules the day, and if that’s true, then the story should be completely mapped out before you ever set out to write a script from it.
Screenwriters often start with either an outline, beat sheet, or story treatment before they start fleshing out a script, and while there are some subtle differences between the three, the key is to have the story in mind before you start writing action and dialogue.
Why write the story before you write the script?
Because screenwriting is somewhat of a hybrid between a prose narrative and a blueprint, it’s best to know what you’re going to describe on the page before you actually do it. Screenwriting has a unique format that makes writing a story as you go a bit more difficult. The number of pages and where certain types of scenes occur in a screenplay are important in a way that they’re not so much in writing a novel or a short story.
You can write an outline of what will happen in each of your scenes, a broad overview of the beginning, middle, and end of your script, or a short narrative of your story.
Writing out your story beforehand may seem like a lot of work, but it’s ended up saving me a lot of time compared to trying to push through and make up each scene as I went. Doing some planning beforehand will teach you how to write a screenplay with a solid story base.
3. Tell What’s Happening Right Now
One of the things that I love about screenwriting is that it’s all written in present tense. You’re telling the story as it is occurring at this very moment. Fiction writers often write in past tense, so when you’re learning how to write a screenplay, this part might take some getting used to. But writing with all present tense verbs causes your story to feel like it’s always moving forward, and that’s exactly what you want for your reader/viewer.
If you want to practice writing in present tense, trying writing the following two past-tense sentences into present tense.
Claire walked into the cave and lit a match. She was startled by the sight of bright-colored balloons scattered all over the large open area.
4. Get the Format Right
This is probably one of the most neglected parts of learning how to write a screenplay. For a screenplay to be taken seriously in Hollywood, it has to follow a very specific format. There are specific margins that have to be followed and certain elements need to be included, as you’ll see in a moment. It’s often been said that one page of script equals one minute of screen time, so it’s important that you get this part right.
A screenplay features the following elements in no particular order though every scene should start with a scene heading:
- Scene Heading — Does the scene take place interior or exterior? Where does it take place? Day or night?
- Scene Description — This is where you describe exactly what your characters are doing in each scene.
- Character Tag — Typed above lines of dialogue in all capital letters, this tells us which character is speaking.
- Dialogue — What the characters say on screen.
- Parenthetical — Just below the character’s name, these are sometimes used to describe how an actor should speak a line of dialogue.
- Transition — Tells a film editor how a scene will move from one to the next. Some examples include dissolves, cuts, and fades.
If you want more information about how to write a screenplay in the proper format, you can check out a book called The Hollywood Standard by Christopher Riley. You can also check out a post I wrote about Screenplay Elements.
There are software programs that are specifically designed for screenwriting to help you get the correct formatting without really thinking about it too much. The most popular is Final Draft, but if you want a free alternative, you can check out Celtx, which is a web-based screenwriting program.
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Tom Farr is a blogger, storyteller, and screenwriter who teaches English Language Arts to high school students. He loves creating and spending time with his wife and three children. He blogs regularly about writing and storytelling at The Whisper Project.
