I've spent the past ten years as a development executive in independent filmmaking, during which I've written about two dozen screenplays, many of them commissioned by producers, and one of which was made into a movie. This book grew out of two observations I made during that time: As a writer, I noticed that what people were telling me was wrong in my scripts was almost never what was actually wrong. That is, if I tried to fix what they said was wrong, it didn't fix the screenplay. But if I figured out what underlay the problem, and fixed that, then the problem often went away. As a development executive reading thousands of scripts a year, I noticed that most writers have no clue what producers are looking for, or what the development and packaging process is like, and therefore their screenplays contain fatal commercial flaws that doom them from the get-go.

The following is a condensation of what I have to say about screenwriting: what's good, what's bad, what works for me, what might work for you. It starts with the really obvious stuff (Spelling Counts) and gets more arcane as you get into "Intermediate Screenwriting" (The Rubber Ducky). I keep adding sections as it occurs to me to pontificate about a subject I haven't pontificated about yet. Eventually I hope to have a complete book on screenwriting worthy of chopping down trees to print it on. Until then, kindly watch this space.

This Web page is © Copyright 1999 by Alex Epstein. It may be freely quoted and / or copied, provided I am properly cited with the URL, http://www.loop.com/~musofire/ so people can find it as I update it, and provided this copyright notice is not removed.

Table of Contents

Beginning Screenwriting

Basic Screenplay Format

Amusingly, Titanic went out listed at 2 hours 74 minutes, just so they wouldn't have to say it was over 3 hours long.

So, a spec screenplay should be from 105 to 115 page. Anything over that gives them one more excuse to reject it. If you have a subject of great epic scope (e.g. I wrote an adaptation of The Odyssey), you can go over 120 pages, but anything over 125 pages is asking for trouble. A 130 page script just looks and feels fat. After you've handled a few thousand scripts, all printed on 20 lb. Xerox paper, you can easily weigh a script in your hand and tell if it's too short or too long.

A low budget spec screenplay, something that is intended for straight-to-video production under $2.5 million, should be 95 to 99 pages or so. Video distributors require movies to be a minimum of 92 minutes long. More pages take more days to shoot, and days cost money.

Comedy scripts may also be shorter. Comedy movies are rarely over 100 minutes long. Woody Allen once said that that ideal comedy length was 87 minutes. On the other hand, people talk faster in comedies, so you may need to break 100 pages in your script. Bear in mind that a shorter comedy is easier to keep funny. If you have a comedy script that's over 110 pages, cut out the least funny 10 pages. Just don't cut out the emotional grounding of the characters that make us care enough to laugh at them.

Television scripts for direct-to-television movies (DTVs, once known as MOWs, or Movies of the Week), miniseries and one hour drama shows are essentially the same, except that they mark where the teaser and acts begin and end. Sitcom scripts are quite different and I couldn't tell you how to format them. A 22 minute sitcom script may be 50 pages long, as I understand it. Action is off on the right, dialog to the left. Don't try to fake it.

The Windows version of the Courier 12 font is about 10% bigger than the Mac version. It adds 10 pages to a script. There is some flexibility in the standards -- no one counts how many characters there are in a line of dialog unless it is obviously overlength -- so don't stress about it. This is only one of countless reasons I prefer Mac!

Don't use too many formatting tricks to shorten an overlength trick. It becomes obvious really fast when the writer, instead of thinking how to tell his story more efficiently, has changed font size or margins. Finish your script, and go back and start cutting.

How to Bind and Send Your Script

Just like unorthodox screenplay format, unorthodox screenplay binding gets you off on the wrong foot. Actually, that's putting it mildly. If your script looks substantially different from all the scripts coming from the studios and agencies, then people know you're an amateur and will treat your screenplay dismissively.

Screenplays should be on 3-hole 20 lb. paper, bound with two (not three) 1 1/4" folding brass brads (ideally Acco #5 brads) with brass washers in back, and card stock covers. You should be able to get brads at your larger office supply stores such as Office Depot. Brass washers are a little harder to find, but I am looking at a box of Universal Office Products "Round Head Fastener Washers," part number 74120, so why not try to find them on the Net? You can order them from www.stenographer.com for about $7.20 a box, plus under $2 for the brads. If that doesn't work out, you can also get them from The New York Screenwriter, 545 8th Ave. #401, New York, NY 10018-4307, who will sell you a box of 100 for $10.50 including shipping and handling. This is highway robbery, but they're a newsletter, not a discount office supply house, for heaven's sake.

Why two brads and not three? Because you only need two to bind a script, and when you're making thousands of script copies a week, as the studios and agencies do, the cost and time of putting in an unnecessary third brad adds up. See? You just saved 20 cents.

Covers should be card stock. You can get card stock at Kinko's or any other print shop or paper store. Please don't use clear plastic covers. Please don't use 3" brads (too long) or those skimpy #7 brads (they don't hold the script together). A few people use screw brads ("Chicago screws"), which I don't mind, but it immediately identifies you as out of the loop. They also tend to be slightly too big for 120 pages. Please do flatten the sharp points of the brads so they won't catch. Bashing the brads with a hammer will accomplish this nicely if you have brass washers; otherwise, push the ends of the brads inwards as you fold them, jamming the two legs of the brad together. Best of all, use pre-creased 9 1/2 x 11" back covers that fold over and cover the points of the brads. Front covers that fold over are a nice complement to these. My printer (L.A. Print & Copy, (310) 445 3200), made fold-over covers for me out of my chosen card stock. If you're willing to pay shipping, I'm sure they'd do the same for you. Really, you can have these made by any good print shop; they just have to take a ream of 11 x 17 cardstock and cut 9 1/2 inches in rather than 8 1/2 inches. This wastes the other half of the cardstock, but that's showbiz, Punky.

Please never spiral-bind your script or use those funny folding metal strips with sliders to bind the script. Brads are the only thing used. Personally, I like to take the bottom brad out when reading so I can flop the pages over. That's impossible with these systems. Not to mention, have you ever tried to feed a spiral bound script into a copier? Ever tried to re-bind a spiral bound script you took apart so you could copy it? It's a real pain.

If you are sending a script from another continent, try to get 8 1/2 x 11" paper if you can. People are a little suspicious of scripts copied onto A4 paper. But if you can't conveniently get standard American paper, it's not a big deal.

Xeroxing your title onto your cover is not done. Only pretentious people bind a selling script in leatherette; if it's your copy of a shooting script for a produced movie you wrote, that's a different story (Nick Meyer, are you reading this?).

The William Morris Agency was for a while copying scripts onto two sides of the page to save trees, postage and schlepping, but it's not done any more. Many people find double-sided scripts harder to read, so I wouldn't do it if I were you.

Don't put a copyright date on the script. It makes the script seem old hat when people read it a year later. However, do copyright it by registering it at the Library of Congress.

Sending your script

You do not need to use bubble-wrap envelopes. You do not need to protect your script with file folders. Just a plain 9 1/2" x 12 1/2 envelope (or a Post Office Priority Mail envelope) will protect it just fine. It's just a pile of paper, for goodness' sake, it's not bone china.

Getting it back

Some people like to include a stamped, self-addressed envelope (SASE) with their script. Unfortunately, this does not help the producer, because the Post Office does not accept stamped mail over one pound unless it is brought to a post office clerk who stamps it. (This is supposedly an anti-terrorism measure, but of course its main legislative benefit is to force everyone to lease postage meters from Pitney Bowes, as metered mail is still accepted in mailboxes everywhere. I guess the idea is that terrorists may have access to plastic explosives, but they sure don't have access to postage meters.)

I've never understood the point of getting scripts back, myself. It costs $3.50 to copy a script if you shop around a bit and make enough copies, and $3.20 to put a stamp on a 15 cent self-addressed manila envelope, so if you get your script back you might save 15 cents. However, your script is probably smudged and coffee-stained, and you're getting it back four months later when you have rewritten it, or ought to rewrite it the moment you get your script sent back with comments. What's the point? Let the producer recycle the paper. No muss, no fuss, no bother.

Some companies will, as a courtesy, send your script back to you at their own expense. Most don't, even when you are also an industry professional. Personally, I tend to mark scripts up when I'm reading them, bend the pages over, occasionally even hurl them across the room in frustration, so they're pretty well thrashed by the time I'm done.

Basic Style

Don't use dependent clauses if you can avoid them. They're not visual; they convey a general sense of what's going on rather than putting pictures in the reader's mind. This tells what's happening:

While Tommy works frantically to adjust the steam valve, Nancy keeps lookout.

...gives you two "shots," two mental pictures. It shows what the other version tells.

This style has the advantage of creating lots of white space on the page. Readers often skip dense blocks of text. (That's right. They just blip over them.)

Obviously, there is no "basic" style for dialogue. That is entirely an outgrowth of character.

No Camera Direction

Don't direct camera, even indirectly, if it's not important to a scene. In an action scene you will want to convey as much visual information as you can put in without slowing the pace. But in a dialogue scene, it may be unimportant how the camera moves. The dialogue and the acting are telling the story. The director will hopefully try to add to the scene by his crafty framing and movement, but unless you've come up with a shot so clever it is telling the story, I would keep your dramatic scenes clean.

As a general note, try to write the scene so that the visuals tell the story, not the dialog. What we see is often stronger than what we hear. According to his book Screenwriting Tricks of the Trade, Bill Froug suggests that, as an exercise, before you write a scene, you try to imagine how you would write it if you were making a silent movie.

This is not to say that dialog is somehow a poor cousin to cinematography, although some pure cinema fans (and a lot of French critics) might think so. It would be just as possible, theoretically, to have an entire movie that takes place in the dark with people talking, as to have an entirely silent film with no dialogue. It's just that a writer's impulse is often to put dialog everywhere. The less dialog you have, the more effective each line is. Your actors' faces will be 40 feet tall on the screen. Trust them to get their feelings across with a minimum of dialog.

However, this applies only to dialog that does things, where the characters move, or attempt to move each other with their words. Dialog that merely refers to events is much softer than seeing the events. An argument is as good as a chase scene. But if you have a character tell us about something that happened, it is perhaps only a fifth as effective as showing us a flashback.

If you want the audience to know a plot detail, you generally are going to have to show it to them. They may miss a throwaway line about an ice pick entirely, but they're not going to ignore the ice pick underneath the bed if you show it to them.

On the other hand, you can use the relative softness of dialog to filter scenes that would otherwise be over the top. There is an extremely effective scene in Jaws in which Robert Shaw's shark hunter character Quint talks about the sinking of a US battleship at the end of World War II. He conjures up the screams of the dying sailors as sharks tore them to bits in the water. There is no way we'd want to see that on screen, even if you could afford to shoot it.

You'll also want to use dialog when what's important is how the character feels about the event, not the event itself. In A Fistful of Dollars,, the husband asks the Man With No Name why he's risked his life to get his wife and child back. The Man With No Name rasps out, "Because once there was a family like yours ... and there was no one to help." We don't need to see what happened to the Man With No Name's family; we only need to know how he feels about it.

To really see the tension between dialog and cinematography, as an exercise, write a 10 minute screenplay that takes place in pitch blackness, then write a 10 minute screenplay without dialogue...

This leads to ....

Only Write What You Can See and Hear

What we will actually see is some people in a kitchen. How will we see, as written, how long they've been in their house, or what it looks like on the outside? How will we see they've been on each other's nerves? The audience won't be reading your description, will they?

Some beginners put lines like that into the script to tell them what the scene's about as they're writing. Fine. Put them in, write the scene, take them out. Other beginners expect those lines to carry the scene. Not acceptable.

You must stick to what you can see and what you can hear. The devil is in the details:

Notice how I've broken up the paragraphs of action. This suggests individual camera angles without distracting. It also helps the format achieve the page-a-minute standard that production managers love.

Breaking up action paragraphs is particularly important when describing an action sequence. A big chunk of solid text is practically unreadable. Break your paragraph shot by shot, if it feels right:

Cut To's and William Goldman

After the "CUT TO:" comes a slugline that looks like this:

INT. JOE'S BARN - LOFT - DAY

The CUT TO: says you're in a new scene. The slugline tells the reader where the new scene takes place.

All of these actions are taking place in the same place and time, and they're all connected. Save your CUT TO's to emphasize when you're leaving the place or time.

This is my style, anyway. There are various schools of thought regarding CUT TO:'s. Shooting scripts have lots of them, selling scripts few of them.

A few people don't use them. I guess they feel they clutter up the page, or they're old hat, or something. Speaking as a development executive who's read thousands of scripts, I find that when I'm reading a script without CUT TO:'s, I can be halfway through a new scene before I realize I'm in an entirely new location or at a later time. Careful readers don't need them, but then neither do elves, Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.

Schreck and the Creepy Guy are not both in the barn, but you don't want to clutter a simple conversation with a lot of visual editing that no one's going to use, anyway.

In a "selling script" (any script not actually in production), do not number your scenes. It's distracting and pretentious, suggesting it's so perfect it's a shooting script.

Bill Goldman is famous for not using sluglines, for example in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He just uses CUT TO's. The script reads like a breeze, with a wonderful sense of energy and movement.

The essential problem with the William Goldman style is that it is excellent at communicating tone without telling the filmmaker very much about what actually is going to be shot, thus encouraging handwaving.

It is the sure sign of a beginner to use this format. It is irritating and unprofessional. When I was on a production at Hollywood Pictures, an extremely overpaid writer handed in a script in this format. We had to have an assistant go in and add the sluglines back, at which point the script turned out to be not ten pages too long, as we'd thought, but twenty pages too long. In the end, the studio not only junked this script, but refused to show more than a few pages of it to any later writers.

Do not use this format until you are William Goldman, or paid like him.

Character Names

I don't give all characters names. I find it's useful to leave secondary characters with a descriptive monicker rather than a name: LONER. That way the reader knows she won't have to keep track of them later.

On the other hand, never name characters THIEF #1, THIEF #2. Make them FAT THIEF and SNEERING THIEF. That puts an image in a reader's head.

For bonus points, you can sucker the reader into thinking someone's not important by not giving them a name. Then later, when LONER -- surprise! -- starts dating the heroine, he becomes NICK THE LONER for a few lines until we know he's NICK.

Apparently some people feel the reader should never be fooled, "A character should always be called what he's going to be called ultimately, even if he looks, at first, like an extra who just happens to be near the action."

I find that many professional screenplays have characters named DARK-EYED MAN that later turn into DR. CZERNY. The writers want to give the reader the same feeling the audience will have: who the hell is this dark-eyed guy? I am sure this practice gives production managers ulcers, but you're writing a selling script, not a shooting draft, and they're paid to have ulcers.

(Okay, I can't resist. You of course recognized instantly that "czerny" is Czech for "dark," as in "czerny pivo," "dark beer." That's the sort of thing I amuse myself with during dark and stormy nights...)

Avoid giving female characters male names. It's hard to remember that SAM is really Samantha. Avoid KIM and LESLIE as men's names for the same reason. For some mysterious reason, even professional screenwriters like to have female characters named JOEY ("Dawson's Creek") and CHARLEY (The Long Kiss Goodnight). They think it gives the character guts. Please find another way to do it. Sarah Connor was totally buff in Terminator 2, and she was still "Sarah."

Never use a name that's hard to read or pronounce. It's a distraction. So "Llewelyn" is out. So is "Kjersti Kyrkjebo." (You think I'm kidding?)

Be careful with foreign names. Even when I don't know the language in question, I can usually tell when someone's made up a name from scratch. The audience knows a lot of things it doesn't know it knows. One of them is what names sound like, even names from strange countries. If you can, take real names from the country in question, and mix up first and last names. Don't use very famous names (Gandhi) unless your character makes a joke about it. How do you get real names? Look in the almanac and find out who was the Minister of Transportation, or look in the Encyclopedia Brittanica and pick out names from the country's history.

Another good way to get foreign names is to get a map of the country and use a place name, or to use a foreign word. Believe me, no one is going to know that Arusha is a place in Masai territory and not the name of a Masai, or that Shikari is Sanscrit for "hunter."

Believe it or not, when you're writing fantasy, you still can't get away with entirely made-up names. Names like "Morlock" and "Gandath" always betray themselves for fakes, generally fakes based on the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy by the great J.R.R. Tolkien. How did he make up his names? Believe it or not, Gandalf, Gimli Gloin and many of the other names come right out of Old Norse and Old English. He didn't make them up, he stole them. Other names, such as Galadriel, he made up using elements from High Elvish, a language he had painstakingly invented based loosely on Finnish with all the gutteral sounds taken out. Tolkien was a philologist (a scholar of languages) at Cambridge University in England; he claimed he invented the Lord of the Rings to justify having made up a lot of languages for fun, his "secret vice." If you are a professional linguist (Mark Okrand, are you reading this?), you too can make up names from scratch. Otherwise, try names from African, Native American or Far Eastern languages like Tibetan and Uzbek.

Science fiction names should follow foreign language rules for human names and fantasy rules for alien names. Human names have not changed much in the past four hundred years, and they are probably not going to change a hell of a lot in the next few hundred years, any more than jambalaya is, if you think about it.

Wrylies

In fact, your script will, if you're incredibly lucky, run a gauntlet of a dozen readers, development assistants, development execs, execs, agents' assistants, managers' assistants and actors. All of them are trying to get through a huge stack of bad scripts, often a stack sitting on their bedside table that is an obstacle between them and sleep. They will not give your script the benefit of the doubt. They will read it in half an hour, or more likely, toss it out by page 15. If a line is not blazingly obvious, and there's no parenthetical to tell them its tone is the opposite of its supposed meaning, they'll just be confused why all of a sudden Joe is glad to see someone they thought he hated, kind of like in a French movie where two people who hate each other are suddenly screwing like minks. Confusion is your enemy. Most readers never recover from it, because they will almost never take the time to figure out what went wrong. They'll just keep reading on, faster and faster, so they can finish and get to sleep.

So keep the important wrylies in.

That said, try to cut out all the wrylies you can. Actor's hate'em. Directors hate'em. They think you're trying to do their job.

What is a 'beat'?

Richard Attenborough, director of Gandhi, with whom I had the good fortune to work while we were developing Barry Schneider and Ron Montana's brilliant unproduced script The Sailmaker, does not like "beat," incidentally. He feels it is an intrusive way for the writer to force his sense of rhythm on the actor and the director. He feels that, like most wrylies, "beat" is only there to help the lazy reader.

Well, sure, but until you're working with Lord Attenborough, your script is probably not being read very carefully, and your readers are lazy. But more importantly, you're writing the words, so why aren't you allowed to write the silences, which are equally important?

The problem is that "beat" does not fill the silence, only mark it. When I need a heavy beat, I try to show what's happening during the beat:

How do you do a montage?

EXT. GARDEN -- DAY (MONTAGE)

1. Two girls skipping rope.
2. A man in a top hat riding a unicyle
3. The Devil walking down the steps, whistling a tune

Instead of telling the reader to make a montage, why not just simply do the montage yourself. This enables you to control the pacing:

Voice Overs

That's an extreme view, fostered in film schools. Voice overs are often used as a last gasp, when the movie is too confusing for audiences and needs explaining.

Ah, you think, "explaining" is bad. Exposition is dull. But exposition, properly done, is as essential to crafty screenwriting as handles are in a cabinet.

Blade Runner is a prime example. Test screening audiences couldn't understand who Deckard was or what replicants were or what was going on. Then the studio (not Ridley Scott) put in Harrison Ford's voice over (Ford reportedly hated doing it) and the movie made more sense.

Between you and me, Blade Runner is a rare example of where studio meddling makes a picture better. The various director's cuts floating around are, in my humble opinion, self-indulgent. The studio cut tells the same story with less subtext and more emotional affect. It's just a more effective picture.

Voice overs are most legitimately used to add a layer of texture to your main character. For example, in the book The Accidental Tourist, William Hurt's character has a deeply strange internal monologue. It makes him interesting. The monologue was jettisoned by the movie, making him seem terribly dull, losing the dramatic tension in a character who has deeply strange thoughts he submerges behind a facade of dullness. The whole point of the character is the way he thinks. So how can you tell his story without showing his internal monologue in a voice over?

That said, be extremely careful using a voice over. Often you will find you are using the voice over to tell us things you've already shown us, or to tell us what is going to happen, or tell us what we already saw. Show, don't tell. Show us closeups to make details obvious if they're not already. (See "No Camera Direction" on how to write a "virtual closeup.") Show us flashbacks and flash-forwards to remind us of past events or to foreshadow future events. Only use a voice over when you have considered all the options and there is no better way to show what you need to show.

Flashbacks

jumping o'er times,
turning the achievements of many years
into an hourglass

Can you give the actor some memento of the best friend, to hold in his hand as he weeps, something we can get a closeup on?

Don't use a flashback to communicate something that the film is already communicating without your help.

That said, don't be afraid of using flashbacks in a clear and coherent way. They can communicate things no amount of talk or linear story telling can. In general, only your central character should have a flashback. Even if the story is not told 100% from the literal point of view of the central character, it is his or her story. Giving someone else a flashback may wrench us out of our identification with the central character. But like all rules, this one is made to be broken when you need to.

Read Your Script Out Loud

This is the most powerful single bit of advice I have for beginning writers. (The most powerful single bit of advice I have for more accomplished writers is "Pitch Your Screenplay". If you hear a script out loud, a lot of the mistakes you've made will become instantly clear. You'll realize that half the dialogue is unnecessary or unclear or plain unsayable.

Even better, get friends or best yet, actors to read the parts, after they've had a chance to read the script once. Then you'll hear what your lines sound like to other people. Actors are the best commenters anyway -- they don't want to rewrite your story, but they'll tell you when something's out of character. Make sure they've read the script once before, or they'll tend to stumble over the words. I have observed that actors are not always very good at reading words off a page for the first time. Acting talent does not always correspond with good grades in high school, believe it or not.

Never Make Your Characters Stupider Than You Are

That doesn't mean you can't have them do dangerous things, only that they better have a strong reason to do them.

People also rarely listen very well, especially in an argument, and often answer the question they expected, rather than the question that's been asked. Often they respond a line or two late. Especially when bringing up something painful, people often talk in circles until the other person figures out what they're trying to say.

Good screen dialog compresses conversation, cutting out its repetitions, dead time and much of its aimlessness, and choosing the most striking, fresh and expressive language that is still believable as something someone came up with on the spot. But like real conversation, good screen dialogue should avoid being "on the nose." Let your characters struggle for their words, and come up with inventions. Let them talk a little aimlessly when they're scared of getting to the point. Let a chance word provoke an argument. Avoid having two characters cut to the meat of the disagreement between them, unless it's a climactic scene, and even then, load your words with hidden agendas.

There almost always wants to be tension between what your character is literally saying, what your character intends to communicate and what your character is thinking.

Look, screenwriting is not easy! If it seems easy, you're probably taking the easy way out, and it will show.

No Unnecessary Bad Language

Obviously, lowlife are going to curse a lot. But it generally does not help your script when business people, cops, soldiers, extraterrestrials or demons from the maw of hell speak like juvenile delinquents.

Most crafty dialog writers try to come up with a fresh and new way for their character to say anything.

This rule (like most rules) is meant to be broken when you have a reason to break it. All I am saying is only use bad language when it creates a specific effect, tells us something about the character, gets a laugh, or justifies itself in some other way. Never use it out of laziness, or because "lots of people talk like that." No one pays $7.50 to see "lots of people," either.

Using Songs and Music in your Script

The exception would be where the song itself is in the foreground of the scene -- where the song is part of the point of the scene. I put Woody Guthrie's song "Pretty Boy Floyd," words and all, into a driving scene. The script was about Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd, and the point of the scene was that Pretty Boy was listening to a song on the radio about himself. He knew he was becoming famous.

You may want to include "background music" if it is actually playing in the scene itself and contributes to the ambience: "A tinny radio plays surf music." "The cradle is empty except for the tape recorder, still eerily playing the Barney song."

You should never tell us about the score, the music written to underly the scene and amplify its emotional impact. Never tell us the music swells at a certain point. If your scene isn't romantic enough, telling us it has great music under it won't convince us or save the scene.

How to Flesh Out Characters - Some Random Thoughts

Put yourself in their shoes. Then think, I'm in this situation, what the hell do I do? Then, if you've seen someone do the same thing in a movie, question yourself about 5 times, because it's probably not really what the character would do, or worse, boring.

For example, you're Sarah Connor, machines from the future have tried to kill you twice, what is your life like? Well, I doubt you are still friends with anyone from your pre-Terminator past, because, like a Viet vet, they can't relate to your experience. Worse, no one is going to believe you. Your only friends are other paranoid nutcases in the survivalist fringe. But they really are crazy. Maybe some professors will talk to you "hypothetically"; perhaps, spiritual people from traditional cultures who fear progress will help you some. But mostly you are alone, alone, alone in the world ... and the human race's existence may depend on you. Imagine the stress that would put on someone? How do you live a life under those circumstances? How do you raise a kid?

What is your character's goal? Their vision? Their dream? What is the force that drives them to do what they do?

What is their flaw? What keeps them from their goal?

Minor characters need to have goals and flaws, too. They should feel like they are real people who only happen to be in the movie for a few minutes before getting on with their lives. If a cop stops your hero for speeding, is he just pure cop? Or is he thinking about his ex-wife, who's screaming for alimony? What if he's just had a really great lunch and he's a little buzzed from too much beer? Suppose you have two cops interrogate a stoolie outside a pastry shop, and the guy keeps getting distracted by the pastries in the window, and the cops have to buy him an eclair to get him to pay attention? That makes your characters human beings. We mostly don't know cops and gangsters. We do know people who can't resist a chocolate eclair.

Drama Is All About Obstacles

If it's a romance, your most difficult task is to give the two lovers the best possible reason not to fall in love. In Jane Austen's day, being from different social classes was a good reason. In Shakespeare's, it was being from warring families. These days race and class are no longer credible obstacles, but a love story between an Israeli and a Palestinian, or a Serb and a Croat, would be perfectly valid retellings of "Romeo and Juliet," as was West Side Story where Tony was white, and Maria was Puerto Rican (even if Natalie Wood wasn't!). There's no shortage of good reasons. In Desert Hearts, one of the lovers is a straight woman and the other is a gay woman; in John Woo's The Killer, one of the lovers is an assassin and cannot tell his lover he is the one who accidentally blinded her during a hit.

If it's a thriller, your task is to get the hero up a tree and make sure he can't come down. Give him a good reason he can't call the police or just run like hell. Take away all his allies, steal his money and his name, and if he still survives, we'll believe he's a hero. If you make things too easy for him, if you give him too many allies, or allies that are too strong, then there's no drama. Sure, Dorothy has friends, but one's a cowardly lion, one's a scarecrow, and one rusts at the first sign of rain.

If there's a villain, make him or her as smart and deadly as possible. It is never okay to save the hero by coincidence, but you can always give the villain a lucky break, just to make life worse for the hero.

In science fiction, it is always okay to come up with a pseudo-scientific reason why the hero can't do what he wants to, but it is very dangerous to give the hero a pseudo-scientific way to solve his problem. Generally the hero should have to come up with a clever solution that would work in our world. Similarly, in fantasy, if there is one way to kill the dragon, we should know it as soon as possible; but the dragon can always surprise us with a new magic power. The bad guys get all the lucky breaks.

If the villain makes any mistakes, they are forced errors; it's because the hero is harrying him right and left that he blows his cool.

As a side note: coincidence is okay in the first act, when it is part of the premise. The further you are into your screenplay, the less you can depend on coincidence. In the second act, your hero and villain can meet by accident, unprepared for each other, but it is not completely coincidence -- they are looking for the same thing. There should probably be no coincidence at all in the third act.

Never Write From Hunger

Write what you love. Write a movie you'd like to see. Or write a movie you enjoy writing, even if you'd never pay money to see it. Write a certain kind of movie as a writing exercise, to develop your craft. But never write from hunger.

Writing from hunger means writing purely for money. Some people make a lot of money writing commercial scripts. But they got where they are because they love what they're doing, they have a gift for it, and they are writing at the top of their ability. They are not condescending to the material.

If you are writing for hunger, your script will tend to suck.

Unless you are a "name" screenwriter with a big fee quote and multiple alimony payments, there is also no point to writing from hunger, because the odds of your selling your script are low. If you write from love and don't sell, you still have the love. If you write from hunger, all you're left with is the hunger.

If you are one of those lucky few who love writing high-octane thrillers, God bless you, stay married and write us stuff worth watching!