Before You Begin
Once you’ve examined the Three L’s — what you live, learn, and love — there are three fundamental keys to keep in mind before you begin developing your story:
Understand your genre • Write to audience expectations • Apply originality
Embrace Your Genre
If you’re writing a screenplay, it’s probably because you love movies. But few people love every genre equally, and that’s fine. Figure out who you are creatively — action, drama, thriller, sci-fi — and commit to it. Don’t try to master every genre. You’ll end up mediocre in all of them.
If you’re a sci-fi writer, own it. Become a master mechanic of the form. Study the characters, stories, and structures that define it. Learn what the sci-fi audience expects — and then learn how to surprise them within those expectations.
Understand Your Audience
Understanding your audience is essential. All good writers craft their work with the reader or viewer in mind. Even Shakespeare wrote to a specific audience — from the poor, illiterate groundlings to the privileged lords of high society — and used every device available to connect with that full spectrum.
Your job is no different. The audience is your customer, and you write for that customer. The screenwriter who ignores the audience will struggle to find any success. We don’t make films for one person. We make them for the many — sometimes a universal audience, sometimes a specific one — but without an audience, there is no film, no script, no screenwriter.
Apply Originality
You don’t need a wholly original idea to write a great screenplay. How many times have we seen Romeo and Juliet? James Cameron’s Titanic is Romeo and Juliet on a boat. Boy meets girl. Opposite sides of the tracks. Families at war. Against all odds, they fall in love. Shakespeare takes them to a tragic end — but you don’t have to. If you’re writing a romantic comedy, the audience demands a happy one.
Don’t feel you must reinvent the wheel. Originality comes not from an unprecedented plot but from a distinctive world and unforgettable characters. Take Avatar — it’s Dances with Wolves in space, which is essentially Pocahontas on the Western frontier.
Same story. Different everything else. Your originality lives in the everything else.