Writing Scenes for Screenplays book

Everyone can come up with a great idea for a story. That’s easy. The hard part is turning any idea into a great story. The answer lies in making every moment count. From start to finish, every scene must entice, captivate, and seduce the audience. To do that, it all boils down to writing great scenes one after another.

A scene acts as the basic building block of story-telling. Like a chain that’s only as strong as its weakest link, so is a story only as strong as its weakest scene. Tell just one weak scene and your entire story risks falling apart. Watch great movies like “Star Wars,” “Casablanca,” “The Shawshank Redemption,” and “Titanic” and there isn’t a single scene that distracts from the story.

Instead, each scene pulls you along from start to finish, holding your attention and sending you on an emotional roller coaster. By the end of the movie, you may not even realize how many scenes you’ve seen. All you know is that you’ve experienced an emotional rush without even realizing how much time has gone by.

To write a great scene, you need to understand the basic structure of how a scene works. Every scene must tell a mini-story that introduces a problem to grab our attention and conflict between two characters who are each trying to achieve a goal. During this conflict, problems arise until the scene ends with one character getting (or not getting) their original goal.

Although scenes act like mini-stories, they must link with other scenes. That means each scene needs to end with a cliffhanger that makes us want to know what happens, and that links to the next scene. More importantly, each scene setups crucial information that pays off in later scenes. The combination of cliffhangers and setups/payoffs keeps multiple scenes connected to each other to tell a strongly structured story.

Think of every scene as a short story. In every scene, two characters must have conflicting goals and the scene shows them fighting to get what they want. Every scene needs conflict because without conflict, there’s literally nothing to make an audience care what happens.

Conflict can be physical (where two people punch and shoot each other) but more often, conflict can be emotional where two characters try to verbally achieve their goals and get what they want by keeping the other character from getting what they want. Every scene holds our attention because we want to know who will win in the end.

Writing a scene involves knowing how to use description, how to write action, and how to write dialogue. Once you know how to write one compelling scene, you can write multiple compelling scenes to tell a captivating story. Knowing how to write a scene for a screenplay is a skill that’s often overlooked, but it’s crucial to master to tell your story the best you can.

Until you can write a great scene, you can never write a great screenplay. So start learning how to write a great scene so you can put them together and create the next great screenplay. Scene writing is a crucial skill that every screenwriter must master and this book will show you how to do it.