Why fear of formatting, filmmaking & the future shouldn’t intimidate you out of writing a script

There’s something familiar about prose. We’ve all read at least a book or two in our lives and we understand generally how words flow together in a story. There’s also something comfortingly self-contained about writing a book or story. We write it and someone reads it. The experience is pretty much complete with no external influence necessary.

But people get intimidated by scripts. I think it’s because they have this aura of mystery around them, brought on by how we see TV, movies and theatre in the entertainment news. Don’t you need to be friends with U2’s Bono to write a musical, we wonder? What’s the point of writing a script if Brad Pitt won’t return my calls? We keep ignoring that great idea we have for a graphic novel because we can’t draw. It feels like we need a whole production team amassed and a theatre rented before we can even think of an idea.

Here’s the thing that this perception completely misses: video games, movies, television shows, stage plays, graphic novels and comics books all start with words on a page just like any other story. You partner with an artist for your comic book, cast your movie, or stage your play only after you’ve got a polished final draft. Those things you’re fixating on as the obstacles to writing a script actually come much, much later in the process. Fear of what happens after you write a script shouldn’t stop you from writing it in the first place.

Then there’s that formatting. A story is just words slammed down on the page with the occasional page or paragraph break as the only necessary formatting. Aren’t scripts supposed to be formatted Just So? You slam the breaks on your creativity because it seems like you’re going to have to do all this research and learn a whole new way of writing to get that formatting right.

Commit this to heart now: Formatting is THE LAST thing you do when you’re writing a script. By all means, just throw words down onto the page willy nilly when writing a first draft just like you would anything else you’d write. Formatting is the final step before you submit your work to an agent, editor, printer, etc. Not writing a script because you don’t know how to format is like not having a baby because you don’t have anything to wear to their college graduation. You’re getting way too ahead of yourself.

I understand the psychology… it *feels* important to have the script formatted correctly from the first word just like it *feels* important to have every word perfect the second you put it to paper. This is that same inner editor I’m always talking about when writing a first draft (or doing NaNoWriMo). Your inner editor wants you to produce a formatted perfectly, ready for its close up script the second you sit down to write and, just like you need to tell it to shut up so that you can get that first draft of a story on paper, you need to ignore it and just get that messy first draft of your script down.

Might there eventually come a point, dozens of scripts down the road, when you’re so completely comfortable with script writing that you format as you go? Probably. But I’ve written a dozen plays and I still don’t bother to format until I’m readying it for the public. My first drafts are still just a mess of words even though I do know the correct way to format.

Ideas trump margin size. Words trump format. That’s true always, really, but it’s especially true when you’re writing a first draft.

This is one of the reasons I recommend a free script writing program like Celtx. While it can take a little getting used to, it forces your script easily into a format (even if it’s not quite the perfect format) which can help keep that inner editor shut up so you can get that first draft down. But, whether you use script writing software or not, if you’re spending more than a minute worrying about whether you’re supposed to write “EXT vs INT” or whether a description is a parenthetical or a stage direction, you’re letting yourself get hung up on pointless distractions that won’t serve the goal of getting ideas down. You’ll be changing so much of your script once you edit, there’s plenty of time to rearrange things.

It boils down to this: worrying about what you’ll do with a your script once it’s finished or stressing out over formatting are just distractions. They’re roadblocks that your mind throws up in front of you to throw your creativity off-course and are best ignored. Just get that first draft written, the other things will come in their time.

And once you have that finished first draft, I promise, I’ll have some posts that help you get started with the formatting and the future too once you’re ready. 😉

Related articles

• How one NaNoWriMo veteran tried Script Frenzy… and ended up preferring script writing to novels
• Sick of your novel? Stuck in a story? Rework your prose as a script for a fresh perspective.