5 Keys to the Screenwriting Craft

Think Concepts. Watch Movies. Read Scripts. Write Pages. Live Life.

There is no one way to learn how to be a screenwriter, however, during my 30+ years as a professional writer, producer, and teacher, I have found these five practices are essential to grounds oneself in the screenwriting craft.

THINK CONCEPTS

The foundation of a good script is a strong story concept.

If you write a spec script based upon the first story idea that comes into your mind, that script will likely suck. Even if it’s decent, it probably won’t sell.

Why? Because almost assuredly, it is not a strong story concept.

It is impossible to overemphasize the importance of a story idea to the eventual success of a spec script.

• A good story concept enables producers and studio execs to ‘see’ the movie.
• A good story concept provides ammo for marketing departments to advertise the film.
• A good story concept emboldens managers and agents to sell the crap out of your script.

I believe a script’s concept can represents about half of the value of a screenplay to a potential buyer. That’s right, half.

Are you thinking of story ideas every day? Do you have a master list of story ideas that is… growing? Is one part of your brain on auto-pilot, always sifting through the daily data that comes your way in search of possible story ideas?

Nobel Prize-winning scientist Linus Pauling said this: “The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.”

We, as writers, should be generating “lots of ideas.”

How to do that? Perhaps the single biggest key is two simple words: What if?

Consider anecdotes from three screenwriters:

Bob Gale: “The inspiration for coming up with the story [Back to the Future] is that I was visiting my parents in the summer of 1980, from St. Louis Missouri, and I found my father’s high-school yearbook in the basement. I’m thumbing through it and I find out that my father was the president of his graduating class, which I was completely unaware of. So there’s a picture…