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Screenwriting Tips 

Loglines

This is what you always want to remember when creating your logline.

• Disclose the main star's STATE

• Expose the important COMPLICATIONS

• Depict the ACTION the star takes

• Explain the star's CRISIS decision

• Hint at the CLIMAX

• Suggest the star's potential TRANSFORMATION

• Classify SIZZLE

• Name the specific GENRE

• Use present tense

Synopsis

Studios and film production companies make decisions at a furious pace, often judging your story solely by the one-page synopsis you send along with the script. A winning synopsis will ensure that your script avoids the immediate rejection pile.

Screenplay

Ensure that your premise is first-rate, strong, engaging, and unique and marketable. 

You need to make sure that you continue to hook and re-hook your audience.    Ask yourself if the attention span of the reader is kept throughout the screenplay.  You do not want to lose the attention of your reader –especially if it is a producer/director.  Ask yourself what is the visual and artistic merit of the material?  Have you created an “eye candy” for the audience?  What is the target audience for this piece?  Will this attract a producer/director?  Have you thought of the type of producer/director that might possibly be interested in this material?  These are all important questions when marketing your work.   

It is important for you to go through thoroughly and check your pace and momentum.  Keep the rhythm steady throughout.  Go through your scenes and make sure that you have worked them as much as possible.  If you feel there is a scene that needs to be deleted, do not hesitate.  Only you know your work better than anyone.  If you can, read through it as if you are reading through it the first time –and you have no idea what it is about.  Be critical of your own work.  You will never ever realize your strengths until you point out your weaknesses.  Remember this. 

Review your dialogue dimensionality, plausibility, and brevity.  Ask yourself what motivates your major character.  Look at the obstacles, plausibility, and point of view from his stance as the major character.  Take a more critical look at the suspense, tension, and intrigue –most importantly- created in your screenplay.  How you tell your story will decide on how quickly it stays out of the trash in the development room.  Ask yourself if you have a style that distinguishes you as a professional?  Are you a unique storyteller?  Are you a master of distinction?

Structure

These are the key elements of structure:

• key event or an inciting incident

• struggle against all the forces of life

• crisis

• climax

• resolution

Having a clear idea of possible beginnings, middles and ends is always a big help for us when reading scripts.  But if the story is strong enough within you, you'll be pressurized a certain way and the story will tell itself. Beginnings and middles and ends are a very good way of trying to work it out in advance. Don't do anything on a whim or because you want to feel really fancy.  It just doesn't work that way. Lies are soon found out. You can't fool an audience.

You need a key event that throws things out of balance at the beginning of the story, then a struggle against all the forces of life, passing points of no return in terms of the central character's effort, until there comes a moment called the crisis. The crisis is when there is only one possible further choice of action for the character to achieve their desire. When the character takes that action, we know that to be the climax.  You will now need a brief resolution at the end to bring things back to normal for the audience.  That's the rhythm of any story.

Characters

It is important that writers create a fine balance of having people that are realistic enough for the audience to identify with, yet are different enough from each other to allow for interesting and dramatic encounters.

You have to have an interest in people; you have to have interest in humanity to be a writer.  When you have a complex character, suddenly your ability to create your character takes a huge leap forward. 

Dialogue

To help you write realistic sounding dialogue, listen carefully to the people around you.  Write dialogue last and remember that the real drama of a film is underneath what is being said and done.  Go through this.  Any line of dialogue that you think is really wonderful you need to cut it out immediately.  If you don't cut down your dialogue somebody else will and they'll be less merciful than you.  Remember that dialogue is the last step in the process of writing a screenplay.  Write your screenplay from the inside out, not the outside in.

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