Writing for Visual Media, 2nd Edition

Writing Techniques for Long Form Scripts

10

So far we have outlined the broad process of developing and writing without going into the craft of how you do it. Many good books are dedicated to writing for the movies and for television that expound on techniques and share the tricks of the trade. This chapter is just an introduction to basics on which the student must build. In other words, if you have never written a screenplay or tried to conceptualize a narrative in a visual medium that lasts for an hour and a half or two hours, here are some of the issues you need to think about.

At the beginning of Chapter 3, we said that a writer is paid for the quality of thinking as much as for the writing. Writing screenplays is not about putting words ...