Ten Essential Tips for First-Time Screenwriters
Embarking on the journey of writing your first screenplay is both thrilling and daunting.
The blank page can be intimidating. The world you can see so clearly in your mind doesn’t appear nearly as cleanly on the page.
There are loads of common traps: weak protagonists, overwritten dialogue, poor momentum, or prioritizing character over plot (or vice-versa!).
By no means are these problems easily or immediately fixed, but here are ten tips for first-time screenwriters that can make the journey to your first screenplay simpler, more rewarding, and ultimately more cinematic!
1. Start with Scenes That Inspire You
Many, many sources will tell writers to begin the drafting process with a compelling opening scene. It’s a nice idea, but the brain doesn’t always work that way.
Focus on what drew you to the idea in the first place. Start with the moments that you feel most viscerally. What is the confrontation that you can’t get out of your head? What is the twist or mic drop that you can’t wait to write? What is your “faking an orgasm in a diner” scene?
Start with this one.
In short, the scenes that emotionally excite you tap into your creative core. This type of scenes becomes a foundation stone for all that comes later. Remember that great scripts come from passion and purpose. They don’t start with kindling, they start with fire.
2. Build a Story That Works for Your Character
Overplotting is easily done. Characters become puppets with story imposed upon them. Writers have complained about this (particularly when discussing other writers) since time immemorial.
You can always throw any character into any plot, but how well the character works within the plot, organically, makes a huge difference. In short, the character’s apparently natural personal decisions must push the plot forward just as much as the machinations of the plot put the character into difficult situations (that of course require these decisions).
Ask yourself a few simple questions: what does the protagonist really want? What does she say she wants? Note that these two things probably aren’t the same.
What does she fear? How would she react to shitty situation X?
All good characters come with an internal flaw; without this, a film falls flat or seems anodyne.
(Varsity Blues (1999) is an example of a situation where an otherwise enjoyable, competently written film falls emotionally flat because the main character doesn’t have any flaws.)
The story that challenges the character’s internal flaw makes the arc feel organic. External conflict forces the character to reveal herself. Or, as John Truby notes, “Structure is character transformation.”
3. Write With Structure—But Don’t Be a Slave to It
Yes, screenplays have a structure.
Yes, certain stories have better structure than others.
Yes, some people claim that there’s one structure to Rule Them All.
None of that is necessarily true. I always suggest using structure not to write a draft, but to edit one. Find the places where it isn’t working and see if you can tighten those by putting it next to some sort of story map.
Not to mention there are many structures out there. Pick which one you think fits your story the best, or throw them all out and see whether you can make the story work without any. It’s possible, although easier to do if you know the possible structures well.
Three acts, five acts, Save the Cat’s 15 beats or Truby’s 22 steps, the Hero’s Journey, etc. can all be helpful but remember that they are tools. You can use them to navigate a script: what are you trying to do with this scene? Identify the purpose within such frameworks and you might just figure out a good way to rewrite it.
Nevertheless, don’t let someone else’s structure be a cage.
Remember, wrong notes are what makes music. If everything were all in the right key all the time, we’d be listening to fucking “Ode to Joy” and nothing else.
Likewise, a good script has a solid shape, but little deviations are allowed. In fact, intelligent deviation is what makes the greatest scripts great. Use structural templates primarily to check pacing, build tension, and monitor character growth.
4. Make Sure Every Scene Moves the Story Forward
Every single scene in your script really needs to:
- Advance the plot,
- Develop character, or
- Heighten conflict.
Ideally, it does all three. If a scene exists only to show how clever your dialogue is or to explain something the audience already knows, cut it. Ask yourself, “If I removed this scene, would the story suffer?” If the answer is no, it doesn’t belong.
(Bold auteurs like Jim Jarmusch or David Lynch aside, obviously, but ask yourself the emotional meaning and structure of their decisions and you’ll find more structure than you expected.)
Think in terms of cause and effect. Each scene, each decision made, will trigger something down the line. It doesn’t have to be the next scene, but it really ought to show up somewhere.
Remember: don’t put a gun on the mantle unless it gets fired by the end of the third act. Even a slow-paced narrative needs to feel necessary. Trim the fat.
5. Determine Whether Dialogue Is Necessary
If a song is to express an idea through emotion and repetition and a play is to express a single idea through dialogue, then a film expresses an idea through image and metaphor.
Have you ever seen a movie with the sound off and still had a pretty good idea what was happening? Yeah, exactly.
Dialogue is helpful, but it takes a backseat to the other advantages of film: image, situation, metaphor, etc.
As one often hears: show, don’t tell.
There’s little more grating than poor exposition. Don’t explain what happened if we can see it.
Dialogue itself deflects. It uses subtext. It’s better to show a person being unwilling to say something obvious than to show the person saying it. We get the idea.
Use silence. Glances, gestures, actions. Dialogue should be the tip of the iceberg—what’s spoken is only a fraction of what’s felt. THink about the way people normally talk: incomplete sentences, weird half-thoughts, obvious lies or untruths.
Good dialogue gets the point across without being obvious. It is not, to use the industry term, “on the nose.”
Great dialogue is both realistic and expressive. Look at the biggest moments in your favorite scripts: great dialogue doesn’t need all the pauses and filler of transcribed speech–that’s simply tedious–but it has a poetic quality that makes it sharp and revelatory while not stating something directly.
6. Create Stakes Early On
The audience needs to care; that’s why they need to know what’s at stake. Not everything needs to be ridiculously high concept. Stakes can be emotional or relational or existential. However, it needs to be clear what it would mean for your protagonist to fail at her goals. It needs to be clear what it means (or costs) for your protagonist to succeed at her goals.
The point of stakes is to ensure the viewer’s emotional investment in the character, and therefore the film. Stakes provide urgency to the character and direction to the plot.
If there aren’t stakes, a scene won’t move anything forward. Without stakes, something might appear beautifully shot and written, yet still seem aimless. In cases such as these, the viewer tunes out (and probably starts looking at TikTok).
Make sure you can define your stakes clearly not only for the script as a whole, but for every scene and every meaningful character.
7. Show Character Through Choices
Characters are defined not by what they say, but by what they do. More specifically, by the choices they make when under pressure.
That is, how does you protagonist react when there’s a (metaphorical or literal) gun to her head?
Well-written scripts place characters in moral dilemmas: when faced with a seemingly impossible choice, one of any number of emotionally charged situations, how does the character react? The choices made in these moments reveal everything about who the character is deep down.
Making sure the character faces plenty of choice is the way to kill the passive protagonist–and, of course, maintain the momentum of your story.
8. Read and Watch Relentlessly
Many–particularly in the academic world–would argue that the screenplay is not a complete document; rather, only the complete film is.
Personally, I think that’s nonsense. It’s vital to understand how the sausage is made, and particularly how action an emotion are transported without the obvious influence of image, pacing, music, and tone.
The best way to do this, of course, is to read screenplays. Many of these are available in published editions, such as from Faber and Faber, or otherwise photocopied PDF versions are available online for many scripts.
It’s always nice to have something physical in your hands, but many scripts are only available online. So be it.
One major caveat: some available scripts are simple transcriptions of the dialogue from someone watching a film. This is also true for many things that are published as “the shooting script.” I would personally avoid these as much as possible because they are either drawn immediately from the film (and you’ll never see the actual version the writer laid on the page), or they have been edited and refined to match the film as much as possible.
Part of reading screenplays is learning how different the finished script can be from the film. A good rule of thumb is that if the script is a photocopied PDF it’s probably safe, while if it’s raw text it might not be. Sites like IMSDb, The Black List, and Simply Scripts are great places to start.
9. Embrace the Mess of the First Draft
Holy shit, your rough draft is going to suck.
I can tell you this because rough drafts always suck. It’s not meant to be perfect. You need to give yourself permission to be messy. Get the story down and explore characters. Write experimental scenes. Write the wrong scenes. Tell stories that never make the next draft.
See what inspires you.
As James Altucher says, the most important thing in a rough draft is to keep typing. Your keyboard skills are literally–not figuratively–the main thing you need to worry about here. Once you have a draft, you have something that exists in the realm of reality that you can chip away at, redraft, and work on.
Or, as we were colorfully advised at university, “Just shit something out; you can always polish a turd.”
10. Get Feedback—But Choose Your Readers Wisely
Look: you need feedback and lots of it.
The problem you’ll encounter sooner rather than later is that many people who read your work will either:
- Tell you they love it because they don’t want to hurt your feelings
- Feel intimidated and don’t understand how they could possibly have any useful suggestions
- Just want to lift their leg on it so they can get the vicarious thrill of having written something without actually doing the hard part (that is, writing the fucking thing)
The key thing here is that good readers don’t even need to be screenwriters. Having good writers help you out can be useful, but some of the best writers give the most useless feedback. (That itself is a paradox older than time.)
The worst are the mediocre writers who just want to piggyback on your work or get jealous of it and try to steer it in the wrong direction.
At the beginning, I’d actually suggest giving it to non-writers you can trust not to pull punches. People without the pretense of formal training often give the most authentically useful advice.
Finally, trust your instincts. Be open to critique.
LIsten if multiple people pull up the same issues in your script; tehre’s probably something here. Likewise, have the courage to stick to your guns if you know that what you’ve done is (perhaps divergent, but) correct.
If your gut tells you to do so, default to your original vision.
Be open to critique, but learn to trust your instincts too. If multiple readers point out the same issue, it probably needs addressing. But if you get conflicting notes, return to your core vision.
Conclusion
Becoming a screenwriter means learning, studying, practicing, writing, and rewriting. This list of tips for first-time screenwriters is only a start.
There is no such thing as a script that comes out fully-formed, although it’s not uncommon to hear stories of quickly-produced scripts (Swingers, Rocky, etc.) that became great films in time.
In most of these cases, that’s the time to write the original draft. No one likes to tally up the countless hours spent drafting and redrafting.
Just keep going. Expect to discover things about the characters, script, and yourself as you go along. The only way to become a true screenwriter is to write, then write some more.
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