How to Write a Screenplay

THE PROCESS

As a final product, the screenplay is a well-structured, carefully constructed piece of pseudo-literature.  The key question in getting to that point is whether or not you should have the structure in place before you begin, or whether you can sit down and just start writing.

Most methods prescribe that you have a treatment, outline and/or beat sheet before you actually start writing the screenplay.  The main argument is that writing screenplays is dominated by structural concerns.  Keen attention is directed toward crafting every scene to move the story forward and not ramble off on a tangent. 

The tools that allow you to adhere to this philosophy are as follows:  

• Beat Sheet: A bullet-point list of the main actions in the story.  Beat Sheets range from 3 to 20 pages, depending on the amount of detail, and are usually written before you write scenes, but may also be used to plan a rewrite. 

• Treatment: A simple prose narrative that tells the story.  Little dialogue, if any, is used.  In a treatment, the minutiae of a scene will not be written out.  For example, a section might read something like this, “Johnny confronts Jimmy and manipulates Jimmy’s faulty memory to locate the key.”  A treatment might be a few pages or could be long and detailed.  Although most treatments do not use screenplay format, some writers have written lengthy scriptments, which are a hybrid of script and treatment. 

Unless you are being paid to write a treatment, as part of a pitch or a writing assignment, you may use whatever format for the treatment or beat-sheet that suits your personal writing process.   In the early stages of writing, a treatment is merely a practical tool to plan the story from beginning to end.  Keeping the outline, treatment or beat sheet as brief as possible allows you to maintain an efficient overview of the entire story and to remain flexible as you modify and refine the story.

The advantages of nailing down the structure of the story before you begin to write scenes are many.  If you need to discard the second half of act two of your story, such a change in the outline might amount to throwing away three paragraphs, but if you must do so in a script, you lose thirty pages or more of work.  Writers who embark upon 40-50 pages without regard to structure must have enough discipline to look back at the pages with a clear, critical eye and to extract only the pages—even if they are a mere handful—that really work in the actual draft.

The following 18-Step Process is a complete approach that constructs a script in a systematic manner yet still allows some flexibility within your writing process.  For those who like to follow a very systematic approach, undertake steps 1 - 18 in order.  If you tend to eschew a systematic approach, you will find that this paradigm allows for tangents, exploratory exercises, and other aspects of your own creative process.

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