How to write a movie

I have written a few scriptwriting guides for absolute beginners that I will try to post on this site.

Now, there is a very weird thing about scriptwriting that even professional book writers don’t really get. It’s very much about the outline. Book writing is 95% talent and 5% structure. If you can write engaging and emotional scenes you can get somewhere. So book writers understand their tools implicitly. But many of the best book writers ever failed in the script world as scriptwriting is 60% talent and 40% structure. If you don’t explicitly know how a story is structured you just will not be able to write it down on 90 weirdly formatted pages while overly focusing on single scenes and events every step of the way. It’s not a fully natural way to tell a story. You create a “fake” blueprint that in itself will be a hard read, but then tell a good story when it is used. A book writer is like a painter painting a house. A scriptwriter is an architect drawing a blueprint. Not the same even though a drawing talent comes into play in both fields.

So here are 9 steps to writing a functional screenplay. When writers skip these basic steps I get really bored with their stories because I’m basically reading an okay book in a clunky format. You can write a great first act without an outline. But then… nothing…

1. Setting

I put setting before main concept in the list because if you don’t feel your story you cannot write it emotionally. So you need to feel it and then think it up.

The setting is the world they are in. Japan? London? A space station? A police station? The setting is a cool universe that drags the reader into the story by itself. But here comes a difficult part; a screenwriter may study a setting for months at a time before writing a single word.

A story that works engages the viewer emotionally. So it has to feel real and interesting for the reader to jump into it. You can wing a few things here and there, but a good story has a deep and realistic foundation to it. You need to know a lot about police work to write a great police story. Write what you know requires that your either study the setting or know a lot about it already.

There are plenty of news articles, interviews, movies and documentaries about various topics. It’s all relevant. It’s not that you need to use everything you have learned, but you need to understand the setting so much that you can go on mental trips in it.

Let’s say you watch a documentary about panic rooms in houses. You have your setting: rich people, family, single house, robbery. This implies a small cozy set, a family story, rich but down to earth people, and dark evil robbers. What then?

2. Grand idea

First comes the inspiration then everything else. It’s just something that appears while you read and watch quality media. It’s also something that grows and becomes a clear story in a brainstorm. At this step you still have the liberty to create and destroy without consequences. As I stated already, I put setting before idea because lack of details, technology, culture and values will make the story feel empty. If the story grows out of nothing it will fade away.

Your cool character concept may be that a mother and daughter move into a big house with valuable stocks hidden in the panic room. They hide from the robbers, but the robbers obviously want to get inside the room! It’s a great concept and action set-piece, but it’s missing something extremely important to make it work as a story… what might that be?

3. Characters

I nearly forgot this point. Characters are essential to drawing out a story. They live in the setting with certain habits. They have certains wants and needs that make them go in search for something valuable that will fix their life and hence creating a theme.

In Panic Room the characters are the mom and daughter creating a family drama and then the robbers adding in the needed conflict, drama and action. All 5 characters want something very important. They all strive and fight for this need. Actually, once I write down the wants and needs it feels like the characters are creating the theme and story for me in some parts. That’s nice. If I created things for them it will feel forced. When you created a real world with real characters it tends to breathe around the plot.

4. Theme

A grand idea is fine. Unfortunately, it’s just cool events. A boy gets superhero powers. A woman takes a trip to another planet. A mother and daughter are stuck in a panic room. They are cool concepts and I used to just run with a cool concept without a greater setting behind it. It leads to emptiness. And so does a lack of theme. There is no story without theme. It will just be a bunch of interesting events without any deeper point to them.

A theme is why you have a need to tell a story. You convey an interesting life experience that engages people so much that they learn from it. Without it your motivation for the story will fizzle out and no reader will be able to love your story.

The theme creates a life lesson that feels like an emotional gut-punch and makes us care for the characters as we experience the world through their eyes. When the robber in Panic Room let go of the stocks and let them fly away with the wind as the police surrounded him the theme he had became clear. It’s about greed, about letting go, about doing what is right even though it may hurt you. All characters had their own wants and needs and theme, but of course the mom-daughter story/theme is the central element. The mom proves her love by fighting for her daughter even though the daughter dislikes her initially for divorcing her dad.

5. Outline

In scriptwriting outlines are extremely essential. They are pretty much essential for any writing anywhere unless it’s a short emotional comment on something that you can keep in your head.

I outline about 1 page per 5 pages I’ll write. But at the end I probably need 7–8 pages per page outlined because the scripts needs breathing space and a few personal scenes that reveal character instead of focusing on plot only. Otherwise the story will feel shallow and rushed.

In an outline all plot points are made clear. If anyone does something to discover a new thing or move the plot forward it needs to be in the outline.

6. Write

When the outline is done writing gets very simple. It takes a day to write 10 crude pages if you have a clear and detailed outline and a deep understanding of the setting. Obviously the dialogue will be crappy on-the-nose dialogue in the first 5 drafts. And there will be plot holes all over the place. You will also constantly need to fix the outline because it won’t really work perfectly in practice. I often discover that I need about 3 times as much exposition as I thought I needed for readers to get my story. On the page a story is just 10 times harder to get than on screen as you have zero visual guides. A talking dog in a movie is: “Huh, the dog talks. Interesting.” A talking dog without any intro in a script is: “Wait, isn’t Fifo a dog? What’s going on?”

7. Rewrite

Before I send my script to anyone I read through minimum 7 times fixing all the smaller stuff. I read slowly through the script and delete or add action lines and dialogue. I remove minor characters. I move scenes around and add a few exposition scenes. When all that is fixed I need to dig deep into the dialogue and make it flow naturally — that’s really hard!

After all of this if I can slowly read through the script while only finding minor mistakes on about every 3rd page it means it’s ready for feedback. I know from experience that if I can see any minor problem whatsoever it means that readers will see it as a huge problem that ruins the script. That’s how it works as writers are biased and pretentious and there is no way to fully shut off that arrogance. So it needs to work nearly perfectly for me to just be okay for readers.

8. Feedback

Without critical and direct feedback you will be stuck writing for yourself, your family, and close friends who are too afraid to properly criticize your work. Feedback is the most important thing we have on this planet.

I have given a lot of feedback and received maybe 10% as much. It’s all great training so don’t feel bad about giving more than you receive. Well-structured feedback goes into; plot, theme, dialogue, characters and formatting. All points need to be analyzed individually in detail.

I only do audio, video and live feedback as it’s much easier, more detailed and easier to understand. Text feedback is great if it’s from clever writers who understand how a story is structured. Otherwise, it will be emotional reactions to simple events in the story.

9. Rewrite

In reality I rewrite all the time so I may as well have added a third rewrite point to this list. Mayor rewrites are hard without feedback because I feel the problems, but can’t quite describe them.

Stuff I always do in all rewrites: Combining 2 characters into one, deleting minor characters, delete scenes with smaller plot points and move those points to other scenes. At the end your script becomes 20% shorter. If it doesn’t become 20% shorter you either wrote an amazing outline or you suck at rewriting.

How much do you rewrite? Personally, it depends on reviews for me. I always ask for clear and direct feedback. If I feel like or am getting a 5/10 from multiple people I don’t rewrite. Into the bin! Sunk cost fallacy will show you that writing a new script that may work is much easier and faster than fixing a pointless mess without a soul. If I get at least a 6/10 with a “it has great potential” then I at least do some bigger rewrites to see what it can turn into. I need to get it up to an 8/10 before I send it to anyone who works in the industry. None of my features are even close to that yet. But even a 7/10 on average is fine to just show off my work somewhere.

Well, rewrite and write again. 10.000 pages later and you are good.