Every Screenwriter Has Their Own Format
On social media, the drama du jour is very often over whether or not to bold slug lines, whether adding transitions is passé or even “offensive to directors,” and so on. Which rules should you follow, or ignore?
You’ve just written a powerful, beautifully articulated paragraph when suddenly the voice of some fetishistic internet rando whose name you don’t even remember screams in your head about how “orphan words dangling at the bottom of a paragraph are so cringe,” so you sit there wasting 15 minutes unnecessarily re-editing. Sound familiar? I hope not, but if it does you’re not alone.
Every week, droves of screenwriters and screenwriter-wannabes post supposedly ironclad rules about screenwriting. Or, worse, a gatekeeper such as a development assistant or contest reader posts the long, petty list of grievances they use as reasons to reject a screenplay. Then they all disagree with each other, often violently.
What about before social media?
Many years ago, as I perused screenwriting books in a used book store, I noticed that each author had a different idea of proper formatting for a screenplay, each insisting theirs was the only true and correct way.
One of the books I bought was Elements of Style for Screenwriters by Paul Argentini, pages 18-19 of which (pictured below) put writers' contact info on the bottom-right and titles in quotes with no underline on the cover, and place parentheticals off-center of character names. I doubt anyone got in red-faced arguments about this back in 1998 though.
Where do we draw the lines?
Setting the motives of the status-seekers and tin gods on social media aside, the fact is that to some degree every screenwriter has their own format, as part of their authorial voice. Oh, and...
Spoiler alert:
Some formatting rules are generally a good idea to ensure scripts provide clear and understandable instructions for adapting them into films or episodes. This said, most of the "rules" people are having tantrums about and using as excuses to discard scripts are merely distractions that unnecessarily inhibit screenwriters.
Let's examine some of the more popular “rules” broken by produced screenplays, starting with page 4 of An Affair to Remember:
Which faux-rules does just this one example break?
- No dialogue longer than 3 lines.
- Don't put actions in parentheticals.
- Don't use em dashes.
- Don't “direct on the page” by including camera shots or editing transitions.
- No “orphans” (dialogue or action text that ends with just one or a few words at the bottom).
Whew! That's quite a few broken fake-rules! But just ask yourself: Did breaking those rules make the script more difficult to understand for anyone involved in pre through post-production? Or make the finished film any less enjoyable? No, it didn't.
Now let's take a quick look at page 37 of Beverly Hills Cop:
Faux-rules broken:
- Don’t use abbreviations (OK, Sgt, etc.) or numerals in dialogue.
- Don't write entire pages of just dialogue (Beverly Hills Cop has many more instances of 3 or more pages of just dialogue).
- Don't use MORE/CONTINUED.
There's no real reason not to write long dialogue scenes. A vast number of excellent movies are dialogue-heavy, so it's weird that this has become a thing. By contrast, I can understand how abbreviations might conceivably trip up actors when reading it, but I've never actually heard an actor complain about it.
Admittedly, these are older scripts. So let's look at more recent ones, like page 19 episode 107 of Ted Lasso:
Faux-rules broken:
- Don't use dual dialogue.
- Don't bold action text.
- No action paragraphs taller than 2 lines.
- Honorary broken rule on behalf of the whole series: page count mandates, because it's generally considered a half-hour comedy, but the episodes vary from 29-76 minutes long!
One extra note about the paragraph length debate: I find reading page after page of single-line paragraphs messy and exhausting to try and read, but nobody should throw scripts out solely for that reason.
A few worth mentioning:
So that I don't run over my word-count limit here, I'll just briefly mention a few other popular ones without showing examples:
- Do/don’t bold or underline sluglines.
This comes down to taste. It may not always look pretty, but many find scripts easier to read that way so I see no problem with it.
- No logline/contest laurels on the cover.
Both are often pointed to as “tacky.” I don't feel one way or another about laurels, but I've had showrunners and reps specifically ask me to include a logline on the cover so they don't have to hunt it down in my email.
And finally...
- Don’t write “we see” or “we hear.”
- Don't use voice-over narration.
- Use “SUPER” or “TITLE” instead of “SUPERIMPOSE.”
- Any note or criticism resulting from the fact that the reader has no idea what multi-camera sitcom format looks like.
These faux-rules I consider beneath contempt and therefore not even worthy of explaining, but I'm including them to un-train anyone reading this article from taking them in any way seriously.
Are there good rules?
At this point, you're probably thinking you can do whatever you want and it'll be fine. Slow down there! Screenplays still have to be legible and understandable to a wide range of people, so here are some “rules” that actually are a good idea:
- Use a standard font, size, and color scheme.
Some examples of playing with these work well, but it's nearly always the case that using a light-pink size 4 Dragonwick font for a fairy’s dialogue to be cute only makes it impossible to read.
Immediately knowing which text is action, dialogue, etc. at a moment’s glance is extremely valuable, both on set and in development.
- Put parentheticals above dialogue instead of embedding them within the dialogue.
This makes it easier for actors, but just so you know, embedding is considered correct for multi-cam scripts.
- Don't insert images of text.
This makes scripts inaccessible for those using screen-readers, and excessively difficult to read for everyone else.
- Use standard enough spelling and grammar so that it’s understandable.
This isn't to say that you shouldn't write dialects and accents in dialogue (you absolutely should!), but I can’t tell you how many scripts I’ve seen with such careless grammar/spelling that it was necessary to re-read about every third sentence just to figure out what on earth the writer was trying to describe.
- Don't rely too heavily on unfilmables.
While great for adding depth to one's interpretation of a character, remember that the end goal is to describe what audiences will see and hear. If you say the protagonist did something because of a specific childhood trauma, but don't at some point indicate that through dialogue/visuals/audio, the viewers will never know.
TL;DR?
In short: 1. Ignore all the ultra-strict rules that people toss around to make themselves feel important. 2. Make sure your script is as clear and understandable as it needs to be, and tells a good story.
That's all. Happy writing!
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Writing children's animation by day and speculative fiction by night, Hilary Van Hoose is passionate about telling aspirational, female-led stories featuring fish-out-of-water who find their place in the world by helping other people. She recently wrapped as a staff writer on Nickelodeon’s Blue's Clues & You Nursery Rhymes, sold an outline to TeamTO, wrote freelance for an international animated YA series, and permalanced on an unannounced animated preschool show.
As a sci-fi/fantasy writer, she is a recent semifinalist for both NBC Launch TV Writers Program and Inevitable Foundation Accelerate, an AFF finalist, a Stage 32 Sci-Fi/Fantasy Screenwriting Contest grand prize winner, and a 1IN4 Writers' Program mentee. Hilary is also a freelance journalist and RespectAbility Lab Fellow with an M.F.A. in Film & Television Production from USC.
