Hi I Want To Try Out Screenwriting For The First Time, Are There Any Online Resources I Can Try Out?

Hi I want to try out screenwriting for the first time, are there any online resources I can try out? Thank you xo

hey! YES, there’s a plethora of wonderful resources online that you can use to get started! 

FIRST:

The best thing to do is to watch a TON of short films. Writing a short is often times harder than writing a feature because you have to pack an entire story into like 30 minutes or less (the best shorts are honestly 15 min or less). And watching and writing a lot of shorts will teach you the basic building blocks of writing anything for the screen. 

LINK TO THE 50+ BEST SHORT FILMS ON YOUTUBE

Also while you’re at it, just watch a ton of movies and read a ton of scripts.

NEXT:

Writing a screenplay for anything—film, tv, web series—is absolutely not the same as writing a longform work like a fic or a novel. You can’t just translate one to the other and suddenly you have a functioning movie.

I know this might be pretty obvious, but it’s worth saying—

You know how most film adaptations of books are bad? It’s cause movies are like max an hour and thirty minutes and so the adaptors have to just pick the one BEST plot point (the main, overarching plot) and writing the story around that. So all your favorite book subplots, little character details, and amazing throughlines, get nixed because there just isn’t enough time to get into all of that. You have 120 pages to tell an entire novel’s worth of story, and every second has to be entertaining, because you’re asking people to sit still for ALMOST THREE HOURS and consume this story. That’s why we end up with watered down movie versions of our books. AND that’s why films often add random shit into the story that’s not in the book—because they’re gonna make the movie as cinematic and as action packed as they possibly can. What works in the novel, doesn’t always work in a film. Also, Hollywood doesn’t give a shit if they stick to the book, they have boxes to check when it comes to entertainment, “””family values”””, and $$$$. 

All this to say, there are completely different story standards for film than for long form writing. And you MUST learn the those standards before you even do the first beat sheet for your idea. If you don’t know how to shape a story for a film you’ll end up with a 300+ page screenplay that would make a bad film. And I’m not going to include my rant on storytelling for tv or a web series because that’s a WHOLE different thing. And the story standards for those differ from a feature or a short. 

So I would for sure buy and read the book “Save the Cat”. I had to read it in undergrad and when I go accepted to AFI, they told me to read it again. It’s an excellent manual for coming up with screenplay ideas and how to write them. 

LINK TO BUY “SAVE THE CAT” 

LINK TO “SAVE THE CAT” WEBSITE THAT HAS A TON OF COOL RESOURCES 

Also, and this has been the most useful thing to come out of my education so far—

LINK TO “THE NINE BIG BEATS”

LINK TO THE BEAT SHEETS FOR POPULAR FILMS

This shows you how to break up your story, the acts within your story, and the major beats your idea has to hit for it to work as a film. Always do a beat sheet before starting to write. 

LASTLY:

You gotta have that formatting down. Screenplays follow a pretty strict formatting structure that you just gotta know. Reading the screenplays to some of your favorite films will help! 

LINK TO A GUIDE TO FORMATTING YOUR SCREENPLAY

LINK TO SCREENPLAYS FOR POPULAR FILMS

Also, it will be easier to format things correctly if you have screenwriting software that helps you! The industry standard is Final Draft but that costs $$$ so here’s a good free alternative—

LINK TO SCREENWRITING SOFTWARE “FADE IN”

And there you go! There’s a lot to learn, and it’s not easy, but dude it’s fun as hell. 

TL;DR 

(”Beats” refers to story beats)