Learning the Elements of a Screenplay

If you’re interested in writing screenplays, it’s important to get to know the nearly identical format all screenplays and film scripts follow.

A screenplay, or film script, is a really specific type of writing that—before I started writing screenplays—I had no idea was such a thing, with such a specific format and approach. I’d really never written one before when I landed on the doorstep of Purchase College, ready, among twenty cohorts, to enter the school’s dramatic writing program in its Conservatory of Theatre Arts, where I studied screenwriting. Within a few weeks of being at college, though, I was completely fluent in the ways screenplays are written. Now, I love the format and the shape screenplays take.

You may have seen a screenplay or two. When I was in college, hard copies of them used to end up in used bookstores. For a while, there were people in New York City who would set up tables of counterfeit screenplays and sell them for ten dollars a pop. These days, there are plenty of PDFs of them floating around the internet. If you haven’t seen one, they look something like this:

Interestingly, it actually doesn’t matter what script you’re looking at here. They all follow a nearly identical format. If you’re interested in writing screenplays, it’s important to get to know this format. Before long, it’ll become second nature.

A screenplay is unlike other forms of writing (such as a novel or a short story). This is true in many ways, but for the purposes of this post, it’s important to note that the screenplay is a tool used to stage a production. Whereas a novel is read by the audience itself, a screenplay is read by a film crew and is often never seen by the audience. It is ultimately the roadmap that will tell scores of people—a director, a cinematographer, actors, set designers, costume designers—how to do their job. It’s no surprise, then, that the mere format of a screenplay page is extremely functional. Below, I’ll explain what each thing you see is, and what its function is.

So, without further adieu, here are the major elements of a screenplay page.

Font

Screenplays are always written in 12-point Courier (Courier New, or other variations, are also fine). This is standardized because using the same font, spacing, sizing, etc. for every single screenplay creates some mathematical averages. For example, one page of a screenplay tends to be roughly equal to one minute of screen time in the finished film.

Scene Headings

Screenplays are broken up into scenes—pieces of the movie that will be filmed at one time. A scene is indicated in the screenplay by a scene heading. It has three elements:

 1. INT. or EXT.: These stand for interior and exterior. The first word in a scene heading is always either INT. or EXT. This tells the film crew whether they’re shooting indoors or outdoors.

2. PLACE: After INT. or EXT. goes the name of the place. So “CEMETERY” or “AQUARIUM,” etc. This tells the film crew where this scene takes place.

3. DAY or NIGHT: This tells the film crew when this scene takes place, which, more importantly, tells them whether or not the environment has to be light or dark. For an outdoor shoot, daytime scenes will typically need to actually be filmed during the daytime and nighttime scenes in the night. For indoor shoots, day can sometimes be cheated with lighting and night can be cheated by blocking windows or using lighting. Either way, this tells the crew what aesthetic needs to be achieved.

Scene headings are left justified. Here are some examples of scene headings:

Action Description

Blocks of text you see on the screenplay page that are not dialogue are referred to as “action description.” This is the writer’s opportunity to narrate what should be going on on the screen. It could be what’s happening in a space, what a person is doing or wearing, or what a space itself looks like.

Action description is left justified.

Here is an example:

You’ll notice that although the scene description above does not include camera angles—that’s not the screenwriter’s job to dictate—it does imply some filmic storytelling. The first line, establishing the busy aquarium, reads like a wide view. The second set of lines, where Joey stands in front of a tank, implies a closer-up view.

Dialogue

Dialogue is what many writers think of as the defining characteristic of screenwriting. After all, in other forms of narrative writing, a reader will say the lines you write in their head. In screenwriting, you’re putting actual words in the mouths of real people.

Dialogue is written by centering the speaker’s name and then writing what they’re to say below it. The text below the name, which is the actual dialogue, is not all centered. It’s left justified and then indented to be below the name.

Here’s an example:

The Dialogue Parenthetical

Because dialogue is literally spoken by an actor, sometimes the writer will insert a note about how the line should be said. This can be a tricky thing to master. It’s good to use sparingly and when necessary, but it can quickly become overkill if you try to do it with every line. That can be called “directing from the page,” and it’s not your job, as the writer, to do so.

Still, it can help. For example, with Tony’s line above, a parenthetical explainer might help an actor nail it on the first try and, importantly, might help a reader better understand the meaning of what’s happening with the line.

For example:

May be very different than:

If this line of dialogue were standing alone—as in, if nothing happened before or after this line—the parenthetical references here would give us a lot of clarity on how to read the line. Of course, it should be noted that the action description directly preceding the dialogue may well have done enough contextualizing for us that we wouldn’t need the parenthetical text at all. (In the first instance, we can imagine an action description telling us Tony has seen something crazy and has run toward it in a tizzy. In the second, we might imagine Tony making a phone call to a girl he likes, trying to play it cool as he asks what she’s up to.)

Transitions

Transitions are another area where the writer can affect how the finished film turns out. This time, you’re giving a note to the film editor, who will decide how to get from one scene to the next.

A transition goes at the bottom of a scene and is found on the right side of the page. It tells us how we’re leaving the scene. Some samples might include:

FADE OUT: This might be used at the end of the film.

CUT TO: This tells us to cut to another scene, usually something happening simultaneously to what we’ve just been watching or something that is otherwise narratively tied to it.

SMASH CUT TO: This is similar to CUT TO, but a harder cut, sometimes for comedic effect.

And that’s it! Those are the major elements of the screenplay page. This may seem like a lot if you’ve never written a screenplay before, but the truth is that once you start doing it, it will become second nature, especially if you use software specifically formatted for screenwriting, which will include keyboard shortcuts to help you navigate between page elements.