Scriptwriting Tips

• Create a fresh perspective to familiarize tales

• The strongest ideas are dramatic, and drama means action

• It must be a compelling journey with dynamic characters that the audience will care about

• Make your story consistent

• Know what you want to write

• Strong scripts know what they are and what they are trying to do

• You need to consider the format

• The more your script is coherently formed, the more impressive and effective it will be

• Hook your audience’s attention immediately

• Begin with the characters in action, showing who they are by what they do

• Do something significant in the opening act (such as setting your characters a problem or dilemma)

• Plan your story (work out the order in which you want your audience to piece it together)

• Bring any important story points from the past into present-tense

• Your ending should follow the character’s journey

• Great endings should be inevitable, but not predictable

• Your character’s journey depends on your genre

• Action = tension and jeopardy

• Thrillers = clues and false leads

• Make things difficult for the characters while raising the stakes for the audience

• Surprise the audience

• Your characters should drive everything that happens in your story and are always on a journey

• Your characters should want and need something, as this would lead to dilemmas and choices

• Understand the world from your character’s point of view

• We don’t need to like or admire our characters, but do need to care for them

• Protagonists can do very bad things but still demonstrate the vulnerability that we can empathise with

• Remember that characters are the beating heart of every great script

• A scene offers a time, place and setting for a significant moment in a story

• If things are explained, then it's an exposition, not a scene

• The position of a scene defines what it does and means

• A dialogue is not just what a character says, it is what they express by what they say. It’s not conversation, it has a purpose

• Characters, just like real people, do not express themselves with perfect grammar or sentences

• Beware of characters pushing issues or agendas that don’t ring true

• Avoid expositional dialogue

• Avoid having characters tell each other things that they would already know

• Dialogue isn’t just about the words on the page, it’s about the things left unsaid

• No script falls perfectly finished on to the page, try to be as objective as possible. Read it like someone else might read it, in one go.

• Read the script out loud and make the characters talk

• Scripts are blueprints in a production process

• No script is finished until it’s made