The Screenwriter's Path

1Original or Adapted

Which Are You Writing?

While it may seem odd to begin talking about screenwriting by asking this question, it really is the first question you need to answer.

An original screenplay is one that you write without basing it on anything else. So you haven’t taken your story from a book, a magazine article, an editorial in the newspaper, etc. The story for this screenplay is something that you came up with. It can be purely fictional or it can be based on a real event. But in both cases, the story is yours.

This is an easy distinction if you’ve come up with a story about a young kid who stows away on a spaceship bound for Mars. It’s easy to see that’s certainly fictional and unless you copied the idea from someone else’s work, ...