Many of us in this modern age have watched a movie, TV show, or even a play and likely thought to ourselves, “Hey! I think I could do that.” After all, how hard can it be? Well sit down dear reader, and I will give you a series of tips and methods to use to make this dream a reality. Hopefully after this, you will have the confidence to craft your very own tale to share with the world. Keep in mind this is only what I have learned through my mentors, peers, and through my own personal experience and research. If you find something doesn’t work for you, or you have a more comfortable process that’s fine! Those differences are what make your script have a unique voice, a way for people, and potential fans, to know this is your work.  Before we can get started, we first need to figure out what to even write. This is the fun part of script writing as you brainstorm your characters and setting for the story. In this beginning section, it is important to write everything down, both good and bad. Even should something look like a silly idea at first, it might turn out to be a good one later on as your story develops and things change. I often keep a notebook on me to copy down all my ideas as I go through my day.

 Starting with characters, it pays off to learn everything you can about their personalities and desires going into their journey. Say you like this Max character, how will they face the challenges you present them. Some popular ways to flush this character out is to craft a series of questions. Don’t feel obligated to keep it tied to your story, right now we are learning who Max is. How would they react if someone close to them left? Would they directly intervene if someone is treated unjustly, or do they lack confidence in themselves? These questions can serve you later as you figure out how Max will deal with the different trials ahead.

Another popular way is to keep a diary for that character. This will help you start thinking in Max’s voice. How would they describe a trip to the grocery store? A drive to work? A rude date? The important thing is what would they notice while they’re on these trips.

My personal process however, is to find their nature and their nurture. Who was Max at birth? Do they have a temper? Are they clever? Are they tall and strong? Then taking these traits and throwing them into a childhood. How would someone with a temper handle bullies at school? Did that turn Max into a fighter, or did they grow insecure as they would lose those fights? Then I ask would ask how being a fighter or being insecure affected Max’s temper. Did becoming a fighter calm Max down, or did insecurity feed that anger. I find this method to be the most time consuming, as you need to establish the same character twice. Once for who they were, and another for who they became. However, it front loads much of the backstory work that you might have to do. Just remember, even if it’s not in the story, it’s good for the writer to know these things as it will add consistency to a character’s behavior.

The other thing to establish would be the setting. This can be trickier than a character depending on where you want to set your story. If the story is set in your personal neighborhood, it might not be too hard to know what the environment is like. Yet if the story takes place on a boat, you might need to do some homework on what boat life is like. Sometimes though, if it is a fantastical setting, it all falls to you to establish the rules and culture of the land. Unless you found a secret passage to the Fae lands and ask them yourself, in which case I’m incredibly envious. For the rest of us though, in a similar vein to how I establish characters, I like to build my worlds through consequences. I try to find the moment that made my world special, or different, then play it out from there. Maybe after a terrible crisis, the government took control and made a police state. How would this police state keep control of its citizens? Is it through brute force or manipulation? If it is through manipulation, how effective is it? Are certain topics of discussion illegal? Depending on what that crisis was can determine how effective the leadership was as containing the situation. This is where you would begin setting up your conflict in the story. Maybe Max was going against the grain and that is why they were bullied. You then should compile all this information on the characters and setting in one location, this will be your story’s bible.

Now that the characters and setting are prepared, the honeymoon phase of writing ends, and the work begins. What even happens in this story? You will likely have at the minimum, something you want to see happen in the story. Maybe you want Max to find true love in this dystopia, and tell this globe-trotting tale of pain, hope, and the indomitable human spirit. Don’t be afraid to keep it small though, as this could just be a simple tale of Max learning self-love after being bullied in their life.

I have heard from different peers and mentors that this step should be done first, as the themes and the messages are the most important. This is a valid option. I however feel it can be an incredibly high level approach, as it can be very easy to get wrapped up in the plot and you start telling the audience what to think, leaving your characters and setting as shallow vessels who only serve as a mouthpiece for this story’s point. If you stay focused though, it can be effective. This is when your story bible comes into play.

Your story bible is where you will keep all your notes about your world and the people in it. Think of it as your history book that you’re writing alongside the script. Use it to keep things consistent in your world. Also, if the plot needs something to happen, but Max would do something else, confront your bible and explore that angle. Don’t be afraid to let your characters exist in their world. If Max was insecure after losing those fights, they might not boldly stand at the steps of the capital building. Maybe instead they rally their community under the radar. If the moment where they stand on the steps is a necessary beat though, set it up earlier in the story. It is said that “problems in the third act are really problems in the first act” and this is true. If you did not set up that Max is the character with the confidence to challenge the government to their face, your audience will notice that. They are smarter than you think, but they can’t read your mind about changes you never brought up before. This is when you need to properly set up your story beats. Let’s take our insecure Max that needs to challenge the government in this climactic finale. Maybe in the beginning they have a scene where they practice a speech in the mirror all morning for a meeting, and it goes horrible. Max just can’t get their nerves under control. Though through the events of the story, that confidence grows to a point that making such a stand makes sense. Only after they learn their lesson, can they confront the climax.

A great template for crafting these moments of growth would be Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey. There you will see early steps such as refusal of the call, where our protagonist hesitates to go on the adventure. All the way down to their darkest hour where it all goes wrong, and back up to the return home as a changed person. Allowing your characters to follow this arc can help keep your story dynamic, and your characters engaging. The story should have now have a strong foundation and you have a soft outline on what happens. This is when all that pre-work pays off as you finally get started on the script.

When you craft each scene, think of it as its own three-act-structure. That it should have a set-up, confrontation, and resolution. Even when a story is told out of chronological order, each moment plays out like a short story. Say we are putting Max against those bullies. Set up why Max gets bullied. Is Max whispering to a friend about that government that is oppressing them and is then overheard? Maybe the bullies approach first and start challenging Max on their views, only to be dissatisfied with the answers. The conflict would be how the bullies would treat Max, do they mock those views verbally, or do they get physical. Ending with the resolution, is Max crying in the bathroom privately after escaping, or are they crying on the floor because they were beaten.

You can also take these moments to add nuggets of information about your world. Is this a place where the bullies can get away with violence, and if so, how much violence? Maybe you want to establish how much group think has infected the society by having others join in the bullying. Try to give each moment two purposes, there is the actual beat moving the plot forward, and exposition about the world around the characters.

Many of you aspiring writers have heard “show, don’t tell” so many times you might be sick of it, but it has a role to play. To show and don’t tell is to trust the audience to extrapolate information from the situation. Don’t have your bullies proclaim, “nobody cares about you Max! you’re at the bottom, and you belong there.” Instead let the observers not intervene to show nobody cares, have them cheer the bullies on to show support of the violence. If you ever fear that your audience didn’t get it, don’t default to explaining the point if it wouldn’t fit naturally into anyone’s dialog. Instead reinforce what has been shown. Maybe the audience didn’t get the full picture, and only believes the bullies exist at Max’s school. Show another similar moment where in town Max gets bullied again because they have a reputation for thinking differently. Have the audience say to themselves “oh, this is happening everywhere.” Instead of “ok, we get it, Max is bullied.”

As each of these little pieces are put together, they will start to form a story, bit by bit. There is only one bit of work from you left to do, and it is arguably the hardest part. Write it! All great books on writing will tell you the secret to finishing a script is to write every day. Write in the morning while your mind is fresh from the dreamscape. Write every day to build the routine of writing. Write every night to cultivate that passion for your project. The more you do, the easier it will become, and before you know it, Max is overthrowing the government. In Stephen King’s, On Writing, he suggest you even save all your editing until the end to save momentum. As someone who has started editing one sentence and ended up spending two hours editing a paragraph only to notice I never progressed the story, I can vouch for this. Saving the editing until the end is also good to help you read the story with fresh eyes away from the context swirling through your head from when you wrote it. Does the story play out on paper the same way it did in your mind?

With your work complete, the script is almost ready All that’s left is to format it into something the industry leaders like to see. This part is a lot less work though, as most of it can be done with a Script Writing Software. This software will change things around like fonts and spacing in order to make your script more professional, which is important if you ever want to convince Johnny Hollywood that the world needs to see Max find true love and save the world on the big screen. There are many options out there both, free and paid, that offer different levels of assistance. All you need to do is find the one that suits you. Just keep in mind my aspiring writers that these are at best recommendations, and that whatever you think works for you, works for you. J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis disagreed on the right way to write a novel and they both created Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia respectively. There are famous static characters out there who don’t go through the Hero’s Journey, like Superman. The entire first hour of Inception by Christopher Nolan is one big tell, not shown, exposition dump, and everyone including me loved it. Don’t put yourself in a box, and tell a story that matters to you. I promise you it is worth it.