How to Write a Screenplay

Most articles on how to write a screenplay make the same mistake: they treat writing a screenplay as a creative exercise first and a professional document second. That approach is comforting, but it's incomplete. A screenplay isn't just a place to put a story. It's a decision-making tool for development, a performance document for actors, a planning document for producers, and a reading experience that has to generate confidence long before anyone commits money or time to the project.

That changes how you should approach the work from page one. The real question isn't whether you can get to FADE OUT. The real question is whether you can build a script that reads with control, survives scrutiny, and communicates a movie clearly enough that other people can imagine making it. Plenty of aspiring writers finish screenplays. Far fewer write scripts that feel structured, actable, producible, and worth championing.

So if you want to know how to write a screenplay professionally, start here: treat the script as a market-facing creative asset, not a private act of expression. Inspiration matters. Voice matters. Originality matters. But on the page, those things only become valuable if they're organized into a readable, persuasive dramatic engine.

This guide covers the full arc of writing a professional screenplay — from concept development and structure through formatting, scene craft, dialogue, rewriting, and market positioning. Whether you're writing your first feature or tightening a script that's almost ready to go out, the goal is the same: a screenplay that reads with authority.

Start With a Filmable Idea, Not Just an Interesting One

A screenplay begins before format, before outlining, and before scene work. It begins with concept selection. This is where many amateur scripts quietly fail. The writer falls in love with atmosphere, theme, or personal symbolism without asking whether the idea actually wants to become a movie.

A filmable idea has pressure built into it. It creates movement, conflict, escalation, and visual consequence. It gives a protagonist something specific to pursue, survive, conceal, prevent, escape, expose, or win. But it also has to fit inside a feature — and a feature can't hold every kind of idea. Some concepts are too diffuse, too episodic, too essayistic, or too dependent on internal thought to function well in screenplay form. Others immediately imply cinematic progression because the premise itself generates scenes.

This is why "good idea" and "good screenplay idea" aren't the same thing. A premise may be emotionally meaningful and still fail dramatically. A script concept needs compression. It needs a governing problem. It needs an audience promise that can be understood quickly. If someone reads the logline and can't intuit genre, scale, or the kind of forward motion the story will create, the screenplay is already starting from a weaker position than it needs to.

Professional writers test concept strength early because weak premises don't become strong scripts through discipline alone. Execution matters, but execution can't fully rescue a concept that lacks tension, clarity, or cinematic shape. Before you outline anything, ask harder questions. What makes this idea inherently dramatic? Why is it a movie rather than a short story, novel, or limited series? What kind of audience is this for? What budget implications are embedded in the premise? Those questions aren't anti-creative. They're what keep creativity from drifting into material that reads as unfocused or unmakeable.

Prove the Concept With a Logline

Before you invest months in a draft, test whether your concept can survive compression. A logline is one to two sentences that distill your story to its most essential moving parts: who the protagonist is, what disrupts their world, and what they're driven to do about it. If you can't write a logline that generates interest, the screenplay will likely face the same problem at scale.

A strong logline doesn't name the protagonist — it characterizes them. "A police chief who's terrified of the ocean" tells a reader more than "Chief Martin Brody" ever could, because it immediately implies vulnerability, irony, and dramatic stakes. The same principle applies to the central conflict: specificity creates intrigue. "Must stop a killer" is vague. "A police chief terrified of the ocean must take to the water and kill the great white shark terrorizing his beach town before the mounting deaths shut down the island — and his career with it." gives a reader genre, tension, setting, and irony in a single sentence. Compare that to the actual IMDb summary for the same film: "When a massive killer shark unleashes chaos on a beach community off Long Island, it's up to the local police chief, a marine biologist, and an old seafarer to hunt the beast down." Same movie — but the protagonist has no characterization, no vulnerability, and no irony. It reads like a plot description, not a dramatic premise. One version makes a reader want to open the script. The other leaves it dead in the water.

The logline also serves a practical function that many newer writers overlook. It's often the first thing a development executive, producer, or manager reads. Before anyone opens your script, they'll see the logline — in a query, on a tracking board, on a competition submission page. It's a sales tool and a clarity test at the same time. If the logline doesn't communicate what kind of movie this is and why it's worth reading, the script may never get its chance.

A few principles worth internalizing: write loglines in present tense, keep them under two sentences, avoid the phrase "this is the story of," and don't pose a question — state a situation. Mention time period or setting only when it's essential to understand the premise. And practice by writing loglines for movies you admire. Compare yours to the official ones. Notice what gets included and what gets cut. That exercise trains the instinct for compression faster than almost anything else.

Outline Before You Draft

Many screenwriters resist outlining because it feels like it kills spontaneity. In practice, it does the opposite. A good outline gives you the freedom to write scenes with confidence because you already know where they're going and why they exist. Without one, writers tend to stall in the second act, circle back to rewrite early pages compulsively, or write themselves into structural corners that require tearing the draft apart later.

An outline doesn't need to follow a rigid template. Some writers use index cards, one per scene, arranged on a board or a table. Others write a sequential document with a few sentences per beat, describing what happens and why it matters. The format is less important than the function: you're mapping the dramatic pressure of your story before committing to 90-120 pages of execution.

At minimum, your outline should answer a few critical questions. Where does the story's existing equilibrium break? What forces the protagonist into action? How does the central problem escalate — not just in terms of new incidents, but in terms of cost, risk, and character exposure? Where does the story reach a point of maximum pressure, and how does the protagonist's response to that pressure resolve the dramatic question?

Outlining is also where structural problems are cheapest to fix. Moving a scene in an outline takes seconds. Moving it in a finished draft means rewriting transitions, recalibrating information flow, and potentially breaking setups and payoffs elsewhere. Professional screenwriters outline not because they lack spontaneity, but because they understand how expensive unplanned structure becomes in revision.

One additional benefit: a solid outline doubles as a communication tool. If you're working with a producer or development executive, an outline lets everyone align on story before a single page of script exists. That alignment prevents the kind of late-stage structural notes that can force a writer to gut a draft they've spent months building.

Build Structure Around Dramatic Pressure, Not Formula

Writers often encounter structure in its most lifeless form: act breaks, page counts, midpoint reversals, inciting incidents, all presented as if screenwriting were a compliance exercise. That framing produces mechanical scripts. But abandoning structure entirely usually produces something worse: stories that stall, wander, or start too late because the writer is relying on instinct without control.

Structure isn't there to make your screenplay conventional. It's there to organize pressure. Good structure answers a simple question repeatedly: what's forcing the story to move now?

Whether you think of screenplay structure as three acts, five acts, or something else entirely, the terminology matters less than what these structures agree on: a screenplay has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and each phase has a distinct dramatic job.

The beginning isn't just setup. It's orientation plus destabilization. You aren't merely introducing a protagonist and the world. You're showing the reader what pattern of life exists, what friction already lives inside it, and what disruption will make continuation impossible. If the opening pages are technically competent but dramatically inert, the script will feel soft no matter how elegant the prose is.

The middle is where most scripts expose their weaknesses. Not because it's cursed, but because this is the stretch where premise has to convert into sustained dramatic design. Escalation matters more than incident count. New scenes shouldn't merely add activity — they should complicate strategy, deepen cost, test character, and force the protagonist into increasingly difficult choices. Repetition in the middle often comes from writing new events that don't meaningfully alter the problem. The midpoint should function as a genuine shift in the story's dynamics, not just a plot event at the halfway mark. When the midpoint works, it reframes the protagonist's understanding of what they're actually up against, which changes the texture of everything that follows.

The end isn't where you explain the theme or tie up every emotional strand with perfect neatness. It's where the script cashes the dramatic promises it's been making. The climax should feel like a collision between plot mechanics and character truth. If the ending resolves the problem without forcing the protagonist into a decisive confrontation with what they've become, the script may conclude, but it doesn't truly land.

One structural element that often gets treated as decorative but is actually foundational: theme. Theme isn't a message you paste onto the story at the end. It's the underlying question or tension that gives the entire dramatic structure its meaning. In the best screenplays, the protagonist's arc expresses the theme — their journey enacts the argument the movie is making about how people change, fail, or survive. If you're stuck in the second act, it's often because you've lost track of what your screenplay is actually about beneath the plot. Theme is the compass that tells you which scenes belong and which ones are just filling space.

This is why professional structure feels less like template and more like consequence. Every major turn should arise from pressure already embedded in the story. When structure is working, the screenplay feels inevitable in hindsight and surprising in the moment. That's the balance you're trying to achieve.

Learn the Page: How Screenplay Format Actually Works

There's a tendency in screenwriting culture to swing between two bad extremes on format. One camp treats formatting as sacred minutiae. The other dismisses it as superficial. Both positions miss the point. Format matters because reading friction matters. A screenplay is a functional document, and professional formatting reduces resistance between the reader and the movie in their head.

That doesn't mean obsessing over trivia at the expense of story. It means understanding what each element of screenplay form is designed to do — and knowing how to use it cleanly so the reader stays inside the experience rather than noticing the mechanics.

One important distinction before diving into the elements: what you're writing is almost certainly a spec script, not a shooting script. A spec (short for speculative) is written to be read, evaluated, and optioned. A shooting script is a production document used during filming, and it includes elements like scene numbers, explicit camera directions (PAN UP, ZOOM IN, CRANE SHOT), and revision markers that have no place in a spec. That said, avoiding camera terminology doesn't mean writing passively. The best screenwriters "direct on the page" — they control exactly what the reader sees and when through the rhythm of their action lines, the specificity of their visual detail, and the way they break paragraphs to guide the eye. The difference is notation versus craft. CLOSE ON the envelope in her hand. is a camera direction. A line break that isolates The envelope. Still sealed. does the same work without stepping outside the writer's domain.

Scene Headings

Every new scene begins with a scene heading (sometimes called a slugline) that tells the reader three things: whether we're inside or outside, where we are, and what time of day it is. The format is simple and consistent:

INT. DETECTIVE'S OFFICE - NIGHT

EXT. COURTHOUSE STEPS - DAY

The macro context (INT. or EXT.) orients the reader spatially. The location identifies the specific place. The time of day (DAY or NIGHT) is all that's needed — you don't write "3:47 PM" unless it's a plot point. If a scene moves between interior and exterior, you can use INT./EXT. to signal that.

For sublocations within a larger setting, use a slash or a dash:

INT. HOSPITAL/OPERATING ROOM - NIGHT

INT. HOSPITAL - OPERATING ROOM - NIGHT

Keep scene headings clean and specific. A heading like INT. ROOM - DAY tells the reader nothing useful. INT. ELENA'S APARTMENT/KITCHEN - MORNING gives them a place to see.

Sluglines

If you need a scene heading that doesn't require INT. or EXT. — a title card, a fantasy location, a non-literal space — Forme allows you to force a slugline by leading with a period:

.TITLE CARD: "THREE YEARS LATER"

.SOMEWHERE DEEP IN SPACE

This convention comes from Fountain, the plain-text markup system that modern screenwriting tools are built on. It keeps the formatting lightweight while preserving the structural signal a scene heading provides. Forme automatically renders scene headings and sluglines with industry standard formatting in PDF exports.

Action Lines

Action lines describe what the audience sees and hears. They're written in present tense, and they should be lean. Dense, overwritten blocks of description slow the read and often signal that the writer hasn't learned to prioritize what matters visually.

A useful discipline: one shot or action per paragraph. This doesn't mean every paragraph is a single sentence, but it means you break the visual flow into readable units rather than burying multiple images in a wall of text.

Compare these two approaches to the same moment:

Frank stumbles through the front door of his dimly apartment. He drops his keys on the floor, doesn't pick them up. Walks past a stack of unopened mail on the kitchen counter — EVICTION NOTICE visible on top — and sits down at the table without turning on the lights.

That tells the reader what to see, in what order, and it lets the details (the keys, the eviction notice, the low light) do the emotional work. Contrast it with a version that tries to editorialize:

Frank comes home. He's clearly exhausted and overwhelmed by the state of his life. Everything around him suggests he's been struggling financially for some time.

The second version tells the reader what to think instead of showing them what to see. Screenplays live in behavior and image. If the audience can't see it or hear it, the script has to find another way to communicate it.

Character Introductions

The first time a character appears, their name is written in ALL CAPS within the action lines. After that first appearance, you can write the name normally. This convention exists for production — it helps casting, wardrobe, and scheduling departments quickly identify when a new character enters the story.

A character introduction is also one of the few places in a screenplay where you can tell the reader something that isn't directly filmable. Use it to establish something essential about who this person is:

KIM (30s), sharp-dressed but visibly sleep-deprived, moves through the newsroom like someone who's already late for three things.

That's more useful than:

KIM (30s), attractive and confident.

The first version implies behavior, rhythm, and pressure. The second is a casting note that tells us nothing about the character's interior life.

For minor characters who appear briefly, keep it functional: SECURITY GUARD, BARTENDER, PARAMEDIC #2. You don't need three lines of description for someone who hands the protagonist a drink and disappears.

Dialogue

When a character speaks, their name appears in uppercase on its own line, followed by the dialogue beneath it:

KIM
I don't need you to fix this. I need you to leave.

If the same character speaks, gets interrupted by an action, and then continues speaking, the convention is to add (CONT'D) after their name:

KIM
I don't need you to fix this.

She sets down her coffee. Looks at him directly.

KIM (CONT'D)
I need you to leave.

Most screenwriting software handles CONT'D placement automatically, but it's worth understanding the logic: the tag signals to actors and the production team that this is a continuous speech broken by a physical beat, not two separate exchanges.

For characters who are present in the scene but not visible on screen — behind a door, under a bed, around a corner — their dialogue is marked (O.S.) for off-screen. For characters who aren't physically present at all — narrators, phone voices, inner monologue — use (V.O.) for voice-over:

DETECTIVE COLE (V.O.)
I'd been staring at the same photograph for six hours. And I still couldn't tell you what was wrong with it.

Parentheticals

Parentheticals are brief, lowercase direction placed between the character name and their dialogue. They indicate how a line is delivered or what the character is doing while speaking:

KIM
(not looking up)
It's fine. Do whatever you want.

Use parentheticals sparingly. A parenthetical that reads "(angrily)" before an obviously angry line is redundant. The best parentheticals redirect the reader's interpretation — suggesting that a line means something different from what the words alone would imply. "(smiling)" before a devastating piece of dialogue, for instance, creates a more interesting read than "(devastated)" would.

If you need more than a few words to describe an action, use an action line instead. Parentheticals are micro-direction, not scene description.

Transitions

Transitions appear right-aligned and describe how one scene moves into the next. The most common are CUT TO:, DISSOLVE TO:, and SMASH CUT TO: — though in modern screenwriting, most transitions are implied. Every scene change is a cut by default, so CUT TO: is only necessary when you want to emphasize the contrast between two scenes for dramatic or comedic effect.

Your screenplay opens with FADE IN: and ends with FADE OUT. Beyond that, use transitions only when they serve the storytelling. Overloading a script with CUT TO: and DISSOLVE TO: is notation doing the work your scenes should be doing on their own — if the contrast between two scenes is strong, the reader will feel the cut without being told it's there.

Format as Professional Fluency

More importantly than any individual rule, format shapes the reading experience. Long, muddy paragraphs make a script feel slower and less confident than it is. Constant camera direction makes the writer seem distrustful of the reader. Overloaded parentheticals flatten performance. Clunky transitions make the page feel dated.

The real goal is invisible professionalism. You don't want the reader admiring your formatting. You want them forgetting about it because the screenplay is moving cleanly. Screenwriting software — whether it's built on Fountain syntax or a more traditional interface — can place elements correctly. But software can't teach judgment. Judgment is what tells you when description is too dense, when dialogue is too explanatory, when the scene is over, and when your page has become harder to read than it should be.

A professional screenplay doesn't call attention to its formatting. It uses format to transmit control.

Write Scenes That Turn, Not Scenes That Merely Occur

Many unfinished or ineffective screenplays aren't doomed by their concepts. They're doomed scene by scene. The writer understands the broad story, but individual scenes don't create enough tension, transformation, or narrative value to justify their existence. A scene that simply conveys information, repeats a dynamic, or decorates the world isn't pulling enough weight.

A useful standard is this: every scene should either shift power, reveal pressure, sharpen desire, complicate pursuit, or force a decision. Ideally, it does more than one. When a scene begins and ends in roughly the same emotional or strategic position, it may be atmospheric, but it's probably expendable.

This is also where professional writing separates itself from beginner writing on the page. Newer writers often explain what a scene means instead of designing behavior that lets the meaning emerge. They overuse dialogue to carry exposition. They let characters state emotional truths the scene hasn't earned. Or they write action lines that summarize the intention of the moment rather than dramatizing it. A screenplay isn't prose fiction. It can't rely on interior access to do the heavy lifting.

Strong scenes are built around playable conflict. Not necessarily shouting, confrontation, or overt opposition, but misalignment. One character wants disclosure, another wants concealment. One wants intimacy, another wants distance. One wants approval, another wants control. Once that friction is present, dialogue gains charge because lines are no longer just information delivery. They become tactics.

The same principle applies to scene description. Good action lines don't try to sound literary at the expense of clarity. They create momentum, frame attention, and tell the reader where the dramatic weight is. They make the film legible. They also show taste. Clean writing isn't simplistic writing. It's writing that understands hierarchy.

Write Dialogue as Action, Not Information

Dialogue is the most visible part of any screenplay, and it's the element that most immediately reveals whether the writer understands dramatic writing or is still thinking like a prose author. In a screenplay, dialogue isn't conversation. It's behavior. Every line a character speaks should be doing something — deflecting, probing, performing, concealing, seducing, threatening, or negotiating — even when the surface content seems mundane.

The most common dialogue problem in amateur scripts is exposition delivery. Characters tell each other things they both already know for the audience's benefit. "As you know, we've been partners for fifteen years and the company is about to go public" is a line written for the reader, not the character. The fix isn't to eliminate exposition entirely — audiences need information — but to bury it inside scenes where the characters have a reason to surface it. A character might reveal backstory while arguing, boasting, lying, or defending themselves. When exposition emerges as a byproduct of conflict, it stops feeling like a briefing.

Subtext is what separates functional dialogue from compelling dialogue. Subtext means the real meaning of a scene lives beneath the words being spoken. Two characters discussing dinner plans might actually be negotiating whether their relationship is over. A job interview might really be a power struggle. When subtext is working, the audience gets to feel smart — they're reading the gap between what's said and what's meant, and that engagement keeps them leaned in.

A practical test: read your dialogue out loud. If every character sounds like the same person, the scene has a voice problem. Distinct characters don't just hold different opinions — they use language differently. They have different rhythms, different vocabularies, different relationships to directness and evasion. A retired detective and a twenty-year-old art student shouldn't construct sentences the same way, even if they're saying similar things.

Finally, know when to cut dialogue entirely. Some of the strongest moments in great screenplays are silent. A character's face after receiving bad news can carry more weight than any line of dialogue. If you can communicate the beat visually, consider whether the words are earning their place or just filling silence the audience doesn't need filled.

This connects to one of the oldest principles in screenwriting: show, don't tell. If a character is broke, don't have them announce it in dialogue — show an eviction notice on the counter, an overdue bill on the table, a card declined at a register. If two characters are falling apart, don't have them narrate the decline — show the empty seat at dinner, the unreturned call, the careful physical distance. While dialogue is a critical component of a screenplay, visual storytelling is what makes screenwriting a distinct form. The writers who lean into it produce scripts that read like movies.

Write the First Ten Pages Like They Have a Job to Do

The first ten pages are discussed so often that the advice around them has become generic. Hook the reader. Introduce the protagonist. Establish tone. While technically true, that language is too vague to be useful.

The opening pages of a screenplay aren't important because they're magical. They're important because they establish trust.

A screenplay reader is asking a set of questions almost immediately. Does this writer understand what kind of movie they're writing? Can they control tone? Do they know how to introduce information? Is there a point of view here? Does the page feel actable and producible? Most importantly, do I feel guided?

That means your opening pages shouldn't simply be intriguing. They should be legible. We should understand the world quickly enough to orient ourselves and feel that the writer is making choices on purpose. Ambiguity isn't the same as vagueness. Mystery can work beautifully. Confusion rarely does.

The protagonist doesn't need to be fully explained in the first ten pages, but the script should establish a relationship between character and world that gives the reader something to track. What pressure defines this person's life? What deficit, contradiction, fear, arrogance, hunger, or wound is active before the plot detonates? Without that, the story tends to feel like events happening to a placeholder.

The opening also needs to establish the script's dramatic grammar. How dense is the writing? How visual is the storytelling? How does dialogue behave? What kind of tension does the movie value? This is where many amateur scripts accidentally sabotage themselves. They spend too long arranging atmosphere without delivering narrative traction, or they rush into plot without building a readable dramatic field around it.

A good test is whether page ten leaves the reader with sharper curiosity than page one. Not just about what happens next, but about how this screenplay thinks. When those pages work, they don't just announce premise. They establish competence.

Rewrite Like an Editor, Not a Protector

Finishing a first draft is an achievement. It's not the finish line. In practical terms, it's the moment when the screenplay becomes visible enough to diagnose honestly. Rewriting is where professional screenwriting begins because revision is the stage where intention meets actual effect.

Most weak rewrites happen because the writer is still emotionally defending the draft. They're line-editing around structural problems, preserving scenes that were difficult to write, or polishing dialogue in sequences that should be cut entirely. That's not rewriting. That's protection disguised as effort.

A real rewrite starts with diagnosis at the macro level. Is the premise delivering enough pressure? Does the first act launch efficiently? Does the second act escalate or loop? Is the protagonist active enough? Are supporting characters functionally distinct? Does the ending resolve the story's real conflict or merely stop the plot? These questions matter more than whether a joke lands or an action line sounds elegant.

A useful rewriting workflow is to attack the draft in passes rather than trying to fix everything at once. Start with structure: get the scenes in the right order, cut sequences that don't earn their place, and make sure the story's escalation is real rather than repetitive. Then do a character pass — read through for each major character individually, checking that their voice is distinct, their arc is trackable, and their function in the story is clear. Finally, do a dialogue pass, cutting unnecessary lines, tightening exposition, and making sure the subtext is doing its work.

Once the structural issues are visible, the next pass can become more surgical. Scene utility. Exposition load. Tonal drift. Description that can be compressed without losing force. Often the strongest improvement in a screenplay comes not from adding clever material but from removing anything that weakens emphasis.

This is also the stage where outside feedback becomes valuable, but only if you know how to interpret it. Notes shouldn't be taken literally in all cases. A bad solution can still point to a real problem. If multiple readers become confused, bored, unconvinced, or emotionally detached in the same place, the screenplay is telling you something, even if their prescriptions differ. The useful skill is learning to identify the note beneath the note.

This is one reason structured analysis can be more valuable than vague encouragement. Serious feedback should help a writer locate failure points in the dramatic system, not just react to isolated moments. That's part of the appeal of tools like Forme when used at the right stage of revision: not as replacements for judgment, but as ways to surface pattern-level weaknesses a writer can then revise with intention. The script still has to be rewritten by the writer. But clearer diagnosis leads to better pages.

Finish the Script With the Market in Mind

Writing a screenplay professionally doesn't mean chasing trends or flattening your voice into something generic. It means understanding that every screenplay enters a context. The script will be read by people assessing not only whether the story works, but what kind of opportunity or risk it represents.

That context includes budget reality. A contained thriller, character-driven drama, broad comedy, prestige biopic, and high-concept sci-fi spec don't travel through the marketplace in the same way. The demands of castability, producibility, international appeal, audience clarity, and attachment potential vary by genre and scale. Writers don't need to become financiers, but they do need to understand that creative choices have downstream implications.

It also includes strategic positioning. Can the screenplay be described quickly? Does it signal a clear audience? Does it feel like an actor piece, a director piece, a producer-friendly package, a sample, or a commercial spec? Different scripts create different kinds of professional leverage. Some sell. Some get meetings. Some get staffing attention. Some function as proof of voice rather than immediately producible projects. The writer who understands what their screenplay is actually built to do is in a stronger position than the writer who assumes every good script should lead to the same outcome.

This is why "how to write a screenplay" can't end at typing FADE OUT. The finished script is only the first version of a professional offering. It may need a sharper logline, cleaner positioning, clearer comp framing, stronger actability, or a rewrite that better aligns the draft with the kind of career function it's supposed to serve. Development doesn't begin after writing. Development is built into how the screenplay is written in the first place.

The writers who advance are usually not the ones with the most passion for movies in the abstract. They're the ones who learn how stories behave on the page, how scripts are evaluated in the real world, and how to turn creative instinct into a document other professionals can trust.

One of the most reliable ways to accelerate that learning is to read produced screenplays — not just for enjoyment, but analytically. Notice how professional writers handle exposition without stopping the story. Study how they structure act breaks, how dense their action lines are, how much white space they leave on the page. Pay attention to what they don't include as much as what they do. You'll find that many established screenwriters break rules you've been told are absolute — but they do it with control, and only after demonstrating they understand the conventions they're departing from.

That's the real answer to how to write a screenplay. Not just by getting it written, but by building something that can move.