A screenplay is a script specifically written for film, TV, video games, or any other visual medium. It is not just the formatting that sets it apart. Screenwriting is a distinct style of storytelling.
In this article, I’ll go over what a screenplay is, explore its history, and show you the key elements that make a screenplay distinctive from other storytelling mediums. And finally, I’ll offer you a Story Weapon to help you get started writing your own screenplay.
What is a screenplay? A screenplay is more than formatted pages — it’s a visual storytelling medium with its own language, history, and craft. Learn how setting, character, plot, and dialogue work together before writing your first script.
The definition of screenplay
A screenplay both tells a story and serves as a blueprint for a production crew with all the various scenes, actions, settings, dialogue, and more that make up a film. In its most basic sense, films are stories told through moving pictures.
Unlike a novel or memoir, a screenplay is constrained by two things:
- the visuals, only showing what the camera can see
- the audio given through dialogue, sound effects, or voiceovers
Even if you’re using a narrator, there is no ongoing, consistent internal monologue in the same way you might see in a novel or memoir. Descriptions are brief in the screenplay itself, and everything is engineered to be as specific as possible to help the production follow along and bring it to life.
While this might feel limiting, it’s simply a different form of storytelling. You can convey your story ideas through images and sounds rather than relying on prose alone.
A screenplay is ultimately a collaborative piece. As the screenwriter, you are the source of the original vision driving the story. You provide the foundation for the director, producers, and actors to build on. Your screenplay guides everyone involved.
A history of screenplays
The art of screenwriting is fairly young compared to other written forms. In fact, the earliest films didn’t even have a script.
All the way back in 1888, Louis Le Prince filmed what is believed to be the oldest surviving film: Roundhay Garden Scene. It runs for less than three seconds.
In 1895, the Lumière brothers refined the technique further, recording and projecting several short films that each ran for about 40-50 seconds long.
Whatever story there was, it was completely tied to what was captured and projected through a hand-cranked machine in front of audiences. Film was mostly a novelty in its infancy, rather than a means of conveying a narrative.
It took many years for the technology to advance into what we think of as filmmaking today, and for filmmakers to begin to develop a cinematic language. As silent films became popular, filmmakers started using an archaic form of screenplay called “scenarios.” These were closer to outlines, roughly detailing what each shot should be.
The real change happened in 1927, with the release of The Jazz Singer. While it was not the first film with sound, it was the first to use synchronized dialogue. Film studios leapt on the technology, and propelled the industry up and away from silent films.
The Jazz Singer is where the type of screenplays we’re familiar with today really started to take off. With the use of synchronized dialogue, what the characters were saying became an important part of the experience. This launched a wave of new job postings where playwrights and novelists came to write for films with their more advanced knowledge of character and dialogue.
From the 1930s onwards, the screenplay, along with filmmaking itself, turned into a much more complete form of storytelling. Writers like Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges emerged to develop the craft. Important tools such as scene headers, action lines, and various other formatting traditions became the standard. With this, screenwriting evolved into the legitimate art form that it is now.
Elements of a screenplay and why they matter
Every screenwriter needs to understand the basic building blocks of the form. Not because these elements are rigid requirements to satisfy before the real writing begins, but because each one is a storytelling tool in its own right. Miss what any of them can do for you and you are leaving craft on the table.
Setting
Every scene in a screenplay begins with a slug line: the scene heading that tells the reader and the production team where and when the scene takes place. Interior or exterior. Day or night. It may look like a technical obligation, but it’s more than that.
The environment your protagonist moves through is part of the story. A character arguing with their father in the cramped kitchen of a childhood home is in a different scene than the same argument happening in a hospital corridor or a parking lot, even if the words are identical. Where a scene takes place shapes what is possible in it, what the character can avoid, what they are forced to confront, what the audience feels before a single line of dialogue is spoken. Choose your settings with the same intention you bring to your characters. They are doing work whether you direct them to or not.
Characters
Characters are not simply the people who inhabit your story. They are instruments through which your story’s dramatic question is explored and answered.
For example, Adrian in Rocky is not merely a shy woman Rocky happens to meet. She is the living embodiment of everything Rocky believes he does not deserve. His relationship with her is the driving motivation of the story, the place where we come to understand what the fight is really about.
When you think of your characters this way, your writing tightens. Every character becomes intentional. Every scene they appear in is doing something it could not do without them.
Plot
Plot is not simply what happens in your story. It is what must happen for your protagonist’s transformation at the end to be earned. Character suggests plot, not the other way around.
Your protagonist wants something. They will pursue it, face the impossibility of achieving it on their own terms, surrender to that impossibility, and see their situation in a new way. The plot tracks the sequence of events that makes each of those stages inevitable.
Every scene in your screenplay should be pulling its weight. If a scene does not advance the narrative by shifting something — a relationship, a belief, raising the tension, allowing a moment to process a new revelation — it does not belong. Cut it without sentiment. If you find your story is missing scenes that would move the transformation forward, write them with everything you have.
Dialogue
Dialogue in a screenplay is more than a conversation. Conversation meanders, repeats itself, arrives at nothing. Dialogue has to work.
Good dialogue reveals character, advances the plot, and says something about the world the story inhabits, all at once. If a character is simply stating facts or announcing their feelings, that is not dialogue. That is exposition wearing a costume.
The best lines in any screenplay are the ones that contain subtext, the ones where what the character says and what they mean are two different things, where the audience hears both simultaneously and understands something about this person that the person cannot quite say directly.
Your story weapon: Write the scene that scares you
If you have a screenplay idea, you likely already know what the scene is. The one you have been circling around, the one you keep pushing further down the outline, the one that would require you to be more truthful than feels comfortable.
If you’re new to the screenwriting craft, don’t worry. Every screenwriter has one. It is usually the scene closest to something real, something personal, something they are not sure they have the right to put on the page.
As a practice, consider writing that scene first.
Not because it will necessarily survive the final draft. Write it because the willingness to go there will change how you approach writing everything else. It will set a standard of honesty your safer scenes will rise to meet. And it will show you something important about the story you are actually trying to tell, as opposed to the story you have been comfortable telling.
The screenplay you are capable of writing and the screenplay you are willing to write are not always the same thing. The distance between those two things is where your work as a writer begins.
So find the scene that makes you uncomfortable. Write it as honestly as you can. Then use what you learn from writing it to do the rest.
Here’s the paradox: Your story lives fully and completely within you – and yet, your idea of the story is never the whole story. Therefore, the process of story creation involves marrying the wildness of your imagination to the rigor of story structure. Keep trusting yourself, while at the same time, holding your idea of the story loosely, so that the truth of your story can emerge.
FREE STORY STRUCTURE GUIDE! Are you struggling with your outline and looking for support? My FREE GUIDE will lead you through the process of marrying the wildness of your imagination to the rigor of story structure to unlock your story within.
