Part One
Many people, and perhaps some of the readers of this book, will start out with confidence in their basic ability to write but be unsure of how they should apply it to the writing of a script. To understand how to write for the visual media, it is important to understand how such writing differs from the writing most of us have learned to do up until now. To break through these habits and become a scriptwriter, we need to see what the specific problems are. Above all, we need some kind of method to solve them. The first part of this book is devoted to a logical and pragmatic analysis of why scripts are written a certain way. If you understand the problem, you will understand the solution. It also introduces you to a basic process of thinking, a method of devising content, and a method of writing in stages or steps. You need to know how to do it.
I had always thought of myself as a good writer, and I liked writing before I ever wrote a script. A lot of you might feel the same way. I started writing scripts in order to have something to shoot in film school. After all, I could hardly hire a professional, and people around me were too busy doing their own projects to help out with mine. Besides, I wanted to write my own script. A lot of you are probably students in media production and will have to invent content for production projects. We all learn the hard way, by trial and error. The following chapters are intended to minimize those errors. Although there is a considerable body of craft to learn, this part of the book is about what a writer should understand before dealing with specific media and their formats. Let’s begin.