James asked Elan Mastai:

I am interested in writing movie scripts. How can you assist me?

Elan Mastai A few thoughts on screenwriting:

1. If you haven't written a screenplay before, I recommend tracking down the scripts for movies you love—most are online—to see what they looked like on the page. Screenwriting is a peculiar literary form, because you're telling a compelling story while also creating what is essentially a blueprint for the crew to make the movie.

2. Movies should be propulsive, you watch them minute-to-minute in real-time, so think about what's happening on each page that will keep the audience glued to the screen. And movies are expensive, so there should be no wasted moment—everything you write, even people in a room talking, costs a lot of money, so consider if you really, really need it.

3. In movies, character is revealed by the choices they make, so do your best to create situations where your characters have to make clear decisions that illuminate their inner thoughts and changing opinions. A movie is about what a character does—and doesn't do.

4. Even though you're writing a literary document, it will be a movie, an audio-visual experience, so you should always be asking: what exactly is the audience seeing and hearing onscreen right now? Essentially you're describing on the page a movie that only you have seen.

5. Screenwriting is a laconic form. You want to use the minimum number of words on the page to convey the maximum audio-visual experience, so every word matters, just like in a movie every shot matters. This is of course true of any kind of writing.

Hope this is helpful.

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