So far we have outlined the broad process of developing and writing without going into the craft of how you do it. Many good books are dedicated to writing for the movies and for television that expound on techniques and share the tricks of the trade. This chapter is just an introduction to basics on which the student must build. In other words, if you have never written a screenplay or tried to conceptualize a narrative in a visual medium that lasts for an hour and a half or 2 hours, here are some of the issues you need to think about.

At the beginning of Chapter 3, we said that a writer is paid for the quality of thinking as much as for the writing. Writing screenplays is not about putting words on paper so much as thinking out storylines, visualizing scenes, and imagining character. What we are talking about is a complex structure that you can travel through or examine from a number of different points of view. Singly, none of them will make a screenplay. Put together, they pretty much cover those issues the scriptwriter has to think about and for which he has to execute technically a finished working vehicle that will manifest in actors' performances and directors' shots. Let's start with character.