First: Screenwrite however you like. Aside from formatting, there really aren’t rules. There can and should be as much style, personality, and nuance in screenwriting as any other form, but here are a few tips/frames that might help beginners. 👇

1 - The main purpose of the screenplay is to allow readers to see the movie in their minds, ideally at the right pace. You can really cut out all filler, especially “We see ” and add lots of visuals. Sentence fragments are fine/encouraged.

.EXAMPLE 1A, FOREST, DUSK

We see a battle taking place in a forest of pine trees. We hear sounds of clashing swords and men screaming.

.EXAMPLE 1B, FOREST, DUSK

Hundreds of men slice through the brush and one another, barely able to see. Swords, axes, screams of death.

2 - Film is 80%-90% visual. Dialogue is cool/fun, but writers (because they’re “writers”) almost universally start out in screenwriting with 800% too much dialogue and 90% too little visual description.

A useful exercise: Try writing your movie without any dialogue.

Another pitfall with dialogue: Writerly folks can easily spend way too much time on it too early. We rewrite a dramatic row ten times before we’ve visualized our movie, possibly discovering that the scene is way too long, out of place or rhythm, or is visually deadly.

3 - It’s easy to start directing the film on the page, announcing camera placement, movement, and cuts. This can be helpful in certain cases but it comes with problems. It violates my first tip above. Excessive visual instruction ironically makes it harder to visualize the movie.

Humans have incredibly capable imaginations. Just as “a picture is worth a thousand words,” words can evoke thousands of images. As soon as you say “The camera pushes in on her face,” you’ve taken your reader out of their imagination and you’ve lost the emotional thread.

4 - In regular prose, you can describe a character’s inner life. Your words are all there is. A screenplay is an intermediate document for creating a movie. In a movie, what is on the screen is all there is.

Try not to write things that aren’t on the screen.

5 - This last one may seem obvious but it’s stunning how often it’s overlooked: Be a writer! Have fun! I know great writers who, for some reason, when they try screenwriting, immediately turn dry and boring, focusing so much on rules and conventions that everything dies.

I don’t intend for this to be prescriptive. These are just some tips/frames that could be helpful and that I find myself offering to almost every beginner who gives me a script to read.

One more thing: I can’t recommend John August and Craig Mazin’s Scriptnotes podcast enough.