SCREENWRITING + SCREENPLAYS: A PRIMER

Anyone old enough to read this knows what a movie or television show is, but not everyone is familiar with the idea of what a screenplay really is (and that’s okay!). In short, the screenplay is the written format upon which a motion picture is based. Well, most of the time.

Screenplays have their own format, which can seem strange or odd to many, considering how different it is from what we’re accustomed to seeing and reading elsewhere, but in time you’ll be able to read a screenplay like you’re watching a movie.

The screenplay format is certainly different from a novel or essay format, which are the most commonly consumed forms of the written word (besides, you know, tweets, etc). For the uninitiated, the closest thing to screenplay format that’s relatively familiar to a good chunk of the population: Shakespeare’s plays. When you think about it, this makes total sense. Shakespeare’s plays were written to be acted out on a stage in front of an audience. As such, the works themselves focus on dialogue, character action, and scene description.

Likewise, screenplays should focus on what the theoretical viewer can see and hear. Remember that a screenplay is just the written medium of the motion picture. When writing a screenplay, always ask yourself, “Can I see this? Can I hear this?” If not, then it probably shouldn’t be in your screenplay. 

As you grow accustomed to the ideas of what belong in a screenplay, then you can work on how you describe what we’re seeing and hearing. While screenplays should be somewhat lean to keep the action moving at a pace that’s relatively consistent with the runtime - about one page per minute of screen time - some writers exercise creative freedom in the ways that they describe the scenes, characters, and actions; using similes, metaphors, creative syntax, etc.

Also keep in mind that different narratives are better suited to some mediums than others. A screenplay is a great format for things that you can see and hear (action). A novel, on the other hand, is often better suited for more internal stories. The narrator in a novel might spend a chapter on how they feel about a certain subject, without describing a scene or even mentioning a specific instance. This doesn’t really translate to a motion picture, and by extension, a screenplay. Even if you wrote your narrator as a voiceover, you still would have to add something for the viewer to see and hear while they pour their guts out. But usually, if you really want the audience to know how a character feels about something, it’s better to just have that character say how they feel to another character. Then we all know, which is generally a good thing.

Even the stage play, which is fairly close in DNA to the motion picture, has a different set of strengths. Stage plays happen on a stage, where the sets are relatively static, there’s only so much room for characters to move, and the audience can only see the actors so close. Thus stage plays, as a whole, are dialogue-driven more than anything else, and the strength of the stage play is really in the performance of the act. (Many of these same rules and limitations do apply, however, to sitcoms and other multi-camera, set-driven television shows, like Seinfeld, Frasier, Family Matters, etc.) With a screenplay, however, you can focus on minute details of action that allow for rich scenes without any dialogue at all, assuming you’re not writing a set-based sitcom, at which point you might have to write the action a little bigger for a dialogue-free scene to work.

Are all shows and movies based on screenplays? 

No. Documentaries, improv comedy, game shows, and ‘reality’ television aren’t (usually) based on scripts, but rather on concepts and formats. Documentaries are made with much of the same production process of other motion pictures - pre-production, filming, editing, etc - but won’t include a conventional screenplay as part of the process. The entire gist of improv comedy is that it’s not written, and the talent of the actors is that they can make up the story as they go along. Game shows have structure, but also are not written. ‘Reality’ TV… well, it’s not really written, but it sure isn’t reality, either.

Format?

This has really just been the gist of what a screenplay is. Next, we’ll start to look at what the screenplay format actually looks like.