Five things to Know on Script Writing

 

Script writing is the art of developing a narrative from a concept, a true story, an existing screen work or a literary work (often called adaptation) like a novel, poem, play or short story and delivering it in a required format. This style of writing can be really enjoyable and financially rewarding should one decide to ply the trade. However, script writing is an art that requires skills which many a time are innate or acquired. But, whichever way the pendulum swings, there are five important steps one needs to follow when writing a script for a stage play, a television or radio drama.

The first thing you need to do is to decide what you want to write about before building a story an summarizing it to the end. Knowing what to write about also requires having a through understanding and deep knowledge of the subject matter through series of researches if it involves too much technicalities.

The next thing is breaking your story into acts and scenes. These terms are divisions into which the phases of your story are grouped. So, it’s the length of your story that determines the number of acts and scenes it’ ll be broken into. You must also be aware that your story doesn’ t have to be unnecessarily long.

Every story must have a beginning, middle and the end. While writing you must consider what kind of plot you are using so as not to go off the line. Simply put, you have to decide whether you want the events in your story to follow sequentially or you want them scattered to be knitted together at some point along the line. You need to also consider the setting of your story. Setting refers to the physical or imaginative atmosphere or location where events take place.

Make sure you do a character breakdown. That is, bringing your characters to life and assigning distinguishable roles to them. Your characters are interpreters and are more like the vehicle through which you convey your message(s) to an audience.

In addition, there’s one more important thing anyone who must write should consider and that is knowing you are the creator of your work. So, you must write about your characters like you can feel the things they feel, see the things they see, hear the things they hear and touch them like they are real people. They can only be alive if you make them be. So, go write a script and let’s see what you cook up thereafter. Have fun!

By Theresa Elerubo