Vale's Technique of Screen and Television Writing

18

The Writing of the Script

Here we arrive at the chapter that might have stood at the beginning of this book. Because everything that precedes it is really part and parcel of the writing of the script.

There is no short cut to this final objective, just as there is no system to beat roulette. In order to know how to write a script, the reader must first acquire a knowledge of the craft.

It would have been useless at the beginning to explain that the screenplay contains dialogue and descriptions of the things to be filmed. It would have been premature to divulge merely technical facts, for instance, that the shooting script has an average length of 120–150 pages in which the shots are numbered consecutively. Although this knowledge is necessary, ...