1. Visualize what the opening shot of your film should be.
2. Decide what your Inciting Incident will be.
3. Decide on your Plot Point 1.
4. Find a Mid Point in which the flow of events reverse themselves.
5. Decide on your Plot Point 2.
6. Decide what your ending will be and write from the end towards the beginning.
7. Have a conflict in every scene you write. Otherwise don’t write it.
8. Decide on a timeline structure – linear, non-linear, a combination thereof? For example, you may start with the end of the story and then flashback to the very beginning.
9. What is the biggest fear of your protagonist?
10. What is your protagonist’s top desire? Her/his source of greed?
11. Write before anybody else wakes up, or write after everyone go to bed.
12. Write outside your home, at a coffee shop, museum, concert, bus, zoo or restaurant.
13. Read the obituaries to find authentic biographical details for your characters.
14. Never show your partially written script to your spouse, lover or close friends and ask for their opinions.
15. Find the emotional soft belly of your main character – why should the audience care for him/her?
16. Summarize the overall theme of your script in one word like “friendship," “courage," “disillusionment," “cruelty," “miracles," “perseverance," “lust," etc.
17. Write every scene on an index card and summarize it in a single sentence. Shift the cards around and see how it affects the flow of your story.
18. Get a good and long night’s sleep before resuming writing.
19. Place great smelling objects (wax candles, flowers, perfume vials) next to your writing desk for some aromatic inspiration.
20. Take a shower and change your socks and underwear.
21. Cut out all scenes in which your protagonist “realizes" things while just sitting there.
22. Write about external events that force your hero to act in certain ways – a bank robbery, a building collapsing, missing a crucial flight, getting fired by a crazy boss, etc.
23. Write as horrific, shameless and immoral an antagonist as you can think of. Don’t hold it back.
24. Write a scene in which the killer and your hero are talking to one another but your hero thinks he is talking to just another guy.
25. Find a noble but hopelessly difficult challenge for your hero.
26. Have your hero resist volunteering for the noble but hopelessly difficult challenge. Reluctant heroes are the best.
27. Make sure your hero leaves the familiar surroundings where she grew up and lived all her life. Make her travel to a foreign and strange location where she feels like the proverbial fish out of water.
28. At the end, return your hero from the “foreign territory" back home in triumph.
29. Have a sidekick helper, a second banana for your hero. A confidant, a wise guru, or a wise spirit in residence.
30. Give your protagonist at least one weakness. Neo (Matrix)’s weakness was his lack of faith in his own destiny.
31. Give your antagonist at least one redeeming quality. Even dictators like pets.
32. Write scenes which do not have neat resolutions. Build realistic ambiguity into your scenes.
33. Visualize your story in chunks of sequences, where a sequence is a set of related scenes. For example, all individual scenes in a car chase would make a “car chase" sequence.
34. Divide your film into 18 to 25 sequences.
35. Have 3 to 5 scenes in each sequence so that your film would have about 50 to 100 individual scenes.
36. Write 90 to 120 pages for a full length feature script in which each page represents one minute of screen time.
37. While writing characters and dialog, imagine how a famous actor would play that scene and follow wherever that imaginary lead might take you. Allow the famous stars that you like talk inside your head and write down what you hear.
38. Don’t forget that you are not writing for the producers or directors but for the studio readers. Don’t bore the readers.
39. Write short descriptions, each a single sentence, if possible. Leave white space in between your descriptions.
40. Write occasional sound effects like POW! or “"door opens SCREETCHING" to bring the scene alive in the reader’s mind.
41. Do not write any camera angles or shot descriptions. Let the director worry about that.
42. Do not write set details like the way curtains or the furniture exactly look. Just say “Manhattan penthouse of a Broadway composer in the ’40s" for example. Let the Production Designer worry about how to translate that into a physical look.
43. Each time you sit down to write, do not leave your chair unless you write 300 words. (This whole list, for example, was written in one sitting within a 2-hour period; plus another half an hour of editing afterwards.)
44. Read the odd and wacky news items and write the same story as a sequence, complete with scene descriptions and dialogs.
45. Try to imagine all the events that must have happened before the very first scene of your movie. Write down the back-story.
46. Use famous characters to help the reader visualize certain actions or postures, like: “After a few drinks, he turned into a Rambo" or “She was Scarlett to his Rhett" etc.
47. Use the symbolism of objects to telegraph future events. For example, show someone cutting his finger in the kitchen with a knife in Act 1 if there is a stabbing in Act 3. Skyscrapers might represent a dauntingly difficult task ahead or (to use a classic Freudian example) domineering male sexuality. Decide which objects might symbolize your crucial story themes the best.
48. Use what Hitchcock used to call a “McGuffin" — an object which is insignificant in itself except to propel the story forward. For example, the Aztec statue in “North By Northwest."
49. In a romantic comedy, have your lovers fight first and hate each other before falling in love.
50. In a horror movie, do not describe the physical act itself but the reaction to it. The reaction is usually more scary than the act.
51. Read the biography or memoirs of a famous screenwriter for inspiration, like that of William Goldman.
52. Rent a DVD or go see a movie in a genre totally opposite to the one you are working on. If you are writing a romantic comedy, go see a political thriller. If you are writing a western, go see an animated children’s movie.
53. Imagine what your protagonist wants to do. Try to hear your protagonist telling you what should happen next. Write those words as your protagonist’s dialog.
54. Imagine how your antagonist would threaten you if you write this or that scene. Try to hear the antagonist’s voice trying to make you change your mind. Write those threats down as the antagonist’s dialog.
55. Try to imagine the kind of musical instrument your hero plays or would have played if she could.
56. Try to imagine the kind of food your antagonist likes.
57. Write down the kind of woman your male hero and anti-hero both fall in love with. Repeat the exercise with a female hero and anti-hero. What kind of a male both would love?
58. What kind of a pet your protagonist and antagonist would have? Perhaps none?
59. What languages do your characters speak? Do they have an accent? What schools they’ve been to?
60. Write one memorable but outrageous allegation or generalization that each of your characters would say.
61. Write what your characters would be doing long after the last scene. Try to imagine their future lives long after your movie ends. Write the post-story.
62. Write down how your characters would die, either during the film or long after it’s over.
63. Write four bad things in a row happening to your hero.
64. Write four close calls and lucky escapes in a row happening to your bad guy.
65. Open the newspaper and pick two characters in two different news items. Combine them to come up with a new, original and outrageous character. For example, let’s say you read a story on parking garage contracts and another one about the latest visit of Secretary of State to China. Try to imagine how a Secretary of State who was a parking lot attendant before he got into politics would act, talk and feel like. Write the circumstances that would have taken him from sitting at a toll-booth to the summit of federal bureaucracy.
66. Delete all adverbs from your descriptions. Use power verbs instead. Instead of “he walked haltingly [or, in a cowardly fashion] towards the kitchen" say “he staggered [or, tip-toed] towards the kitchen."
67. Eliminate the qualifier “very" from your vocabulary. “Very" usually does not add anything to a sentence while bloating it. “He was surprised" is stronger than “he was very surprised."
68. Write a “happening" that is plausible. External events are necessary to force the characters respond to them but they have to be believable. A shark attack is a believable “external dynamic" for a movie taking place in Hawaii but not for a desert movie. If a character pined for lush hair in Act 1 and Act 2, we might welcome him stealing wigs and cutting people’s hair while they are sleeping in Act 3. But we would find the same development contrived if the character is an absent-minded physics professor who could care less about hair business. Prepare your reader for such developments without, however, showing all your cards in the early acts.
69. Never allow children and animals die violently in a screenplay. That’s a big no-no.
70. Do not write about main characters who are journalists. That has been written about six million times in the past.
71. Give unusual traits or hobbies to stock characters. For example, can a mafia enforcer be gay? (Remember Vito Spatafore of The Sopranos?) What if a police detective is also a Latin scholar? Can a sexy drop-dead gorgeous blond visit one doctor after another to cure her dog breath? What if a sheriff in a rough frontier town is developing a taste for J. S. Bach’s concertos?
72. Write three words that your protagonist overuses.
73. Write three words that your antagonist uses to insult people?
74. In a war movie, decide in which scene our heroes would be up against the wall before they bounce back and triumph?
75. Write a bedroom scene in which the characters are talking about a) solar energy, b) Chinese food, or c) submarines while they have passionate sex.
76. Imagine a traffic accident between two vehicles. Write the way the vehicles and the drivers look like. Then rewind the accident scene and follow each vehicle backwards to where they came from. Write the separate lives that the two drivers have led before their paths crossed in that accident.
77. Write down the exact acceptance speech you will deliver on stage when you will be accepting your Oscar for the Best Original Screenplay - presented by your most favorite Hollywood actor.
78. Write a scene in which the characters, although both speaking the same language, have no idea what the other is talking about and they completely talk past one another.
79. Write a page-long dialog in which every line is a question.
80. Write the dialog of two dogs or household pets talking about their owners.
81. Imagine your characters watching the film you’ve written and criticizing you for all the things that are “not correct" about the story. Allow your characters tell you what the “correct" turn of events would be. Write everything down as you hear it.
82. Create a scrapbook for your screenplay. In it, paste all the photos of buildings, people, furniture, cars, home decorations, etc. that impress you and leave a mark on you. Use that scrapbook full of favorite images as your vault of inspiration.
83. Take a “Sweat Break." Get out and exercise. Run, lift weights, play ball or do anything that is appropriate for your medical and physical condition. But make sure you break some sweat. Then take a good shower before going back to writing.
84. Get as many color swatches as you can from the painting department of your hardware store. Then start meditating on different colors. Try to associate different colors with different events in your story. Try to imagine your story as a series of colors instead of a series of sequences and events and see if that would inspire you to write new scenes of significance.
85. Make a list of ten different dishes that either your characters would like (or hate) or around which significant events would occur. Remember the discussion about burgers and french fries in “Pulp Fiction"? Would your evil antagonist love carrot cake? Or spicy Pho soup? Would they drink milk while they make love or eat raw parsley?
86. In one word, write down the top reason why your hero and bad-person are doing what they are doing. What drives them forward like nothing else? Is it revenge? Or money? Jealousy? Cowardice? Hubris? Ignorance? Illness? Curiosity? Honor? Hate? Love? Religiosity? Patriotism? Fanaticism? Poverty?
87. Write down three steps in which things get progressively worse for your hero, and progressively better for the antagonist.
88. Write down a 3rd Act event that would twist and reverse both the hero’s and antagonist’s fortunes.
89. Compress the same events in your story into a single hour in your hero’s life. Write a two page treatment in which everything takes place within a single hour.
90. Stretch out the same events in your story to a whole century even more. Write a two page treatment in which everything takes place within a few centuries.
91. Give your hero and antagonist six different names and see what kind of a change that makes in your story line and dialogs.
92. Write the list of physical and non-physical things that your characters owe to the other people.
93. On a sheet of paper, write down the names of your most favorite ten movies in two columns. Then connect different titles across the columns and try to come up with novel log lines, just as if you are summarizing the story to a producer. For example: “It’s Godfather Coming to Dinner" [“Godfather" and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?"] or “It’s Shrek Tearing the Wall Street" [“Shrek" and “Wall Street"], etc.
94. Take a mini tape recorder and record the conversations you hear in a public space like a shopping mall or a baseball park, etc. Transcribe the tape and write dialog based on some of the things you’ve heard in real life.
95. Paint a watercolor to rest your agitated mind.
96. Read the pages that you’ve written backwards, from the last page towards the first.
97. Write your story with the omniscient voice of someone who has died and went to the Other Side and now describing the things he/she is observing on earth.
98. Make a list of every scene in your screenplay by just the names of the characters in the scene. If your hero’s name is not in 70 or 80% of the scenes, increase his/her screen time or rethink who your hero really is.
99. Whose story is it really? Make sure you have a very clear and sharp answer to this question. Your movie needs to be the story of only a single person, not two or three.
100. Write down the “character arcs" for all your main characters. A character should not end the movie in the same way that he/she starts it. Whether good or bad, all characters must change, evolve or devolve before we reach the last scene.
101. Rewrite important dialogue by introducing “not" and negating each statement. For example, rewrite “I love you and I trust you" as “I do not love you and I don’t trust you" and study the implications of such a reversal on your whole plot line. After appreciating the new directions in which the story may take off, go back to the original story if you wish, with a new appreciation for the possible variations hidden inside your main story.
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