screen writing as a craft

Screenwriting as a craft

Screenplays are written for filming, much like plays for performance on stage. They therefore demand a lot of imagination. If you're writing a script, it's worth creating an outline. With her you always have a guideline to orient yourself and to document your progress.
If you're unsure about how to format scripts, I recommend you read a lot of scripts. Meanwhile,scripts are also available for download on the Internet. That's the quickest way to learn the technical design possibilities and what you can do for your own purposes. Writing beginners should definitely learn to put as many ideas on paper as possible before trying to get something into shape.
Find stories
The most important element in screenwriting is the main character's goal. A good movie story has a clearly identifiable goal. It is the red thread of the storyline, so it needs to be strong enough to hold the movie for 90 or 120 minutes. This goal will be as strong as possible if your protagonist pursues it with burning passion. If you know what the most popular genres are, you already know the most famous goals. Maybe there is no clearly identifiable goal in your film idea. In that case, it becomes very difficult to make it into an exciting movie storyline - maybe you better dedicate yourself to another idea.

Create movie characters

At the center of every story are the figures. Movie characters are the engine that will drive the movie later. The bridge between the main character and the film act is the character orchestration: how do the individual figures stand together, who works for whom and who changes the sides? Who is the opponent, who are the allies?
Whether it's character driven or plot driven storytelling, the characters are always the most important thing. In action-driven storytelling, one tries to approach the figures from the outside, the figure-driven ones from the inside.
Both approaches have their strengths and weaknesses. Focusing too much on the inner life of a character, the story loses its external tension. On the other hand, if one puts the action of the figure in the foreground, the story loses depth. One should try as possible to combine both approaches. The character and plot are ultimately two sides of the same coin and the main character is the key to the
If you know your movie characters, you can already think about the appearance of the characters.

Develop dramaturgy

One point that haunts many authors is the logic of the plot, or the dreaded plot holes. You should not waste too much time on this. When looking closer, there will always be holes in the plot.
As long as the motivation of your characters is clear (why they want something and why right now) and you make sure the action follows causality (A follows B, B follows C), you're on the safe side. The decisive factor is to arouse the sympathy for the characters in the audience and to not let go of it until the end.

Write scenes

Every good scene represents a story in itself. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. Just like stories, the individual scenes are determined by the goals and needs of the characters. First, ask yourself who the main character of the scene is. This does not have to be the main character of the story, each scene can have a different one. Which goal is your character pursuing? Who is her opponent? Does the character want to reach her target directly, or is she trying to manipulate the other characters without knowing what she's really up to? What is the scene with? When constructing a scene, it is sufficient to list the individual beats. You can do that with purely functional dialogs, if that makes it easier for you. Finally, you can rewrite and improve the text anytime.

Write dialogues

Writing good dialogues is the fine art of script writing. That's because they can never stand alone. Film dialogues are always just the tip of the iceberg. If the characters, plot and theme of the movie do not work - how should dialogue be? The exchange of blows between the characters depends on everything else being worked out well in advance.
A very weak dialogue already fails on the functional level, that is, the motives of the characters remain unclear. As a result, the viewer does not know what the filmmakers want out. A mediocre dialogue may be functional, but it lacks the character of the speaker and is very flaky