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screenwriting

noun

The craft of writing screenplays for film: setting down a story in scenes, action description, and dialogue using a standardized format, so that the script serves as a blueprint for production.

Origin A compound of screen — the surface on which a film is projected — and writing; the related term screenplay joins screen with play, on the model of the stage play.

  1. Craft The practice of composing a screenplay: developing story and structure, describing action and setting, and writing dialogue in the conventional script format used by film production.

  2. Profession The profession and body of work of the screenwriter, including original screenplays and adaptations of existing material. A screenwriter may develop an original screenplay from a premise, or adapt a novel, play, or true account into a script.

What screenwriting is

Screenwriting is the craft of writing the screenplay — also called the script — for a film. The screenplay records the story as a sequence of scenes, describing the action and setting in the present tense and setting out the characters’ dialogue. It is written to be performed and photographed rather than read as prose, so it specifies what an audience would see and hear rather than interior thought. Within filmmaking, the screenplay generally precedes production and functions as its blueprint: a shared reference from which the directing, performance, design, and other departments work.

Story, scene, and dialogue

A screenplay is built from scenes, each typically a unit of continuous action in one location and time. Story structure organizes these scenes into a larger arc; many accounts describe feature screenplays in terms of acts, turning points, and a rising line of conflict, though practice varies. Action description conveys the visible and audible events of a scene, while dialogue carries what the characters say. The written word is provisional: performers, the director, and the editing process reshape the material, and the finished film often differs from the script that preceded it.

Format and drafts

Screenplays follow a standardized format that aids reading and production planning. Scene headings (sluglines) mark whether a scene is interior or exterior, name the location, and note the time of day; action lines, character cues, and dialogue each occupy fixed positions on the page. By long-standing convention a page of correctly formatted screenplay corresponds roughly to one minute of screen time, which lets a script’s length signal a film’s approximate running time. A project commonly passes through stages of development — among them a treatment, a prose summary of the story, followed by successive drafts that are revised before and sometimes during production.

Original work and adaptation

Screenplays are broadly divided into original works, written from a premise the screenwriter devises, and adaptations, which derive from existing material such as a novel, play, article, or real events. Adaptation involves selecting, compressing, and reordering source material to suit the different demands of the screen, and it raises questions of rights and authorship distinct from those of an original screenplay. Both kinds share the same formal conventions and the same role as a plan for what is subsequently filmed.

See also

  • filmmaking— The collaborative process of creating a motion picture, spanning development, pre-production, production, and post-production, and involving specialized creative and technical roles.
  • directing— The practice of the film director: guiding the creative realization of a screenplay by shaping performance, staging, and camera into finished scenes, and coordinating the work of a production's departments toward a unified film.
  • film editing— The selection, arrangement, and joining of individual shots into a continuous finished film; also the profession and craft of the editor who performs this work.

Sources

  1. Syd Field, “Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting”
  2. Robert McKee, “Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting”
  3. Oxford English Dictionary, “screenplay, n.”
  4. Writers Guild of America, screen credits and format guidance

Last revised: September 18, 2026