10 Reasons Why It Is Deceptively Difficult to Write A Good Screenplay

Last edited Fri Sep 26, 2025, 09:32 AM - Edit history (1)

There was a documentary film where they walked around the streets of Hollywood and Los Angeles in general and asked people "What is your screenplay about?" Cab drivers, tourists, people in the grocery store, a sex worker, a street preacher, a Goth kid. All of them had one.

Admittedly Hollywood is a magnet and a microcosm for those obsessed with such things but every year thousands of people pay to enter their scripts into contests or for review and possible position on the Blacklist. On average, every year 67,000 screenplays are registered with the WGA. An even bigger number are begun and never finished or never registered.

So tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of people have experienced something or heard someone else's story or have come up with a premise and thought 'Wow that would make a great movie!' Those who take the next step find out how hard it is and how few of us are prepared. But why?

1. Writing a great movie takes a whole different skill set than recognizing a great movie. We have all seen a thousand movies but writing one requires flipping that all over.

2. A great movie changes direction at key moments. The hunter(s) become the hunted. Professor Snape turns out to be an ally. Darth Vader is Luke's father. Protagonists can be betrayed, injured, imprisoned, freed, accused, recruited, seduced. Often their beliefs are changed by facts or events. To write these kinds of surprises is no easy feat. The best ones are unforeseen yet logical in hindsight. There is a trick to knowing where your story is going yet holding back enough information to keep the audience engaged by surprising them by refreshing the goal of the hero and making the story less linear.

3. You have to keep a question or two in the mind of the audience at all times. And as those questions get answered, new ones must be created. Imagine for example, we see woman, well dressed, obviously financially comfortable but she is picking up cans beside the road. This creates the question: Why is she doing that? She gives them to an unhoused person. Nice, and there is the answer to the first question but it creates two more questions for the viewer: Why not just give them money or food? and What is her relationship with this person? Etc.

Most horror movies start with an attack by the monster or bad guy. There is little context at this point in the movie so what is really going on is the writer is planting the questions -- How bad will this get? Who will stop this? Soon they show us who but that can create more questions when that person seems unqualified, uninterested or over-matched. In a RomCom the audience knows they will get together so the questions are there from the start -- how and when.

Most of us aren't used to thinking about what does the audience know and not know at every point during the story telling and then managing those thoughts very actively because

4. We are too close to the stories that interest us most. We know way more about our characters, settings, details and stories than the most interested and attentive audience member ever will. It's all interesting and important to us or else it wouldn't seem like a great story. This kind of immersion makes it harder to think about what is the appeal and hook for others.

5. We want to "pants it". That is, we are tempted to just write the story by the seat of our pants, make it all up as we go along or just start writing interesting things that happened to us. Screenplays that are started with no outline or ending tend to stall and die around page 25. It is a bit like starting to tell a joke without knowing the punchline. Everything in a great story propels us toward the ending. An emotionally powerful and satisfying ending has to be set up by the story that leads up to it. If we expect the audience to feel some deep emotions at the end then we have to earn that; we have to maintain emotional truth throughout the story.

6. We want to do research. Lots of it. About what people really did or would do, about what really happened. It's a trap. A quagmire. Research never ends. The original idea gets changed to something better that we found while doing research but it doesn't get written because the research never seems complete. The best advice I ever got on this was 'Write it first and then do only the research necessary to rewrite it."

7. True stories are a trap. "Truth IS stranger than fiction" and that's a problem. Truth is complex, maybe even unknowable. The truth of a story can change depending on whose perspective it is. The more common version of this problem is that life events seldom have satisfying beginnings, middles and ends. We only have 100 minutes or so tell the whole story so we must either narrow the focus or impose distinct structure or both.

8. We don't want to write a film that is too much like one that already exists. We brainstorm ideas and shoot them down just as quickly. That has been done. Too predictable. Seen it before. Meanwhile the audience wants a familiar structure and pace. Now more than ever, with audiences distracted by their phones, they want a story they can follow, even anticipate. RomCom and Thrillers tend to follow well established pacing and structure. Even non-writers know that every RomCom must have a "meet cute" scene and nearly every thriller has a moment when all hope seems gone. As creative people we want to reinvent the wheel but the audience usually just wants a new wheel.

9. Dialog is incredibly hard to master. A sure sign that you have not mastered dialog is all the characters talk like you do and say exactly what they mean. They reveal backstory just because we need or want it to be revealed. They use each other's names even when there are only two characters in the scene. Problem is real people don't do that. People all have their own goals and motivations and quirks. They talk around things and they bring subtext. The writer is one person but they have to live inside the heads of 10 different characters in order to make them feel real and distinct.

Dialog is the last thing to get locked down on most films. It can get changed on set. Get changed in post. Sometimes it gets changed for the re-release or the DVD.

Films rely more on dialog than they used to but the images are what give great films their power. Great art evokes more than it specifies. Describing great music never equals hearing it and film is not that different because its greatest power comes from abstraction and universality. Directors and writers who have created great films get asked questions like "What does it mean when the character has that look their face?" or "What does the ending mean?" It means whatever each member of the audience thinks it means. It means different things to different people but only if they care enough and were given enough space to connect with it and give it meaning.

Consider the emotional power that can happen when you minimize dialog; for example, when you make the protagonist a donkey and Kuleshov the whole thing:

10. We can't think like Hitchcock or other pure filmmakers. Most of us think in words when we think of storytelling. Hitchcock, Malick, Kurosawa, Scorsese, Spielberg and other think in images and do it masterfully. The power of a film like EO or 'Tree of Life' are in their images and ambience. By evoking the experience and mystery of life they keep us in a familiar mode. They leave gaps that engage what Jonathan Gottschall calls "the storytelling animal" in each of us. They mirror the experience of life, full of mystery and questions, and the audience puts it all together. The craft of a great writer is to make them want to and to use what is not told and not said in such a way that the audience makes the story their own.