Scriptwriting Basics: elements to a screenplay
The Bare Bones Book of Screenwriting available at amazon.com teaches the basics of screenwriting from story to format to business.
Professional screenwriters usually have written over a dozen scripts before selling a spec script in the market, getting a literary or film agent to represent them in Hollywood. Of course, some script writers make a million dollar sale off their first or second screenplay, but it's like winning the lottery.
The first place to start when writing a screenplay, is a concept. Is the concept appealing in a visual medium like film? Movie writing is prose, poetry, written in a style to conjure images in the reader's head and "see" or "feel" the film as they read the script. It starts with a great concept. That's the seed.
Conflict is to story like a musical note is to a piece of music. Without conflict, a story cannot progress to a climax or resolution.
Now that you have chosen a marketable and good concept that includes conflict, unique characters and a world filmmakers want to create and movie audiences want to view, you're ready to flesh it out into a synopsis - a one page beat sheet of your story.
The one sheet synopsis is used to pitch the overall screenplay, and serve as marketing ad copy for the future.
You need to learn structure, pace, plotting, interweaving plots, rise of action, and how to write a screenplay by scenes, sequences, acts, action lines, and dialog. You need to understand character archetypes, and old storytelling fundamentals, linear structure, 3 act structure, how to get in late and get out early, pacing techniques, dialog training, editing process, timing, and more.
There's a lot to learn, and it starts with education books used by college film students and independent filmmakers and first time screenplay writers learning the craft and conventions.
