How to write a script
Decide which script you are writing before you write it, because screen, stage and radio are three different crafts. Screen is pictures and one page per minute. Stage is language and what a theatre can physically do. Radio is sound with no pictures at all — and it is the most open route in Britain for a new writer.
Three forms, three crafts
The differences are not stylistic. Writing a screenplay's structure into a stage play produces something no theatre can stage.
| Screen | Stage | Radio | |
|---|---|---|---|
| The unit | The image | The speech | The sound |
| Length | 90–120 pages (feature) | 60–120 minutes | 15, 30, 45 or 60 minutes |
| Timing | ~1 page per minute | Varies with staging | ~1 page per minute |
| Locations | As many as budget allows | Few — a theatre has to build them | Unlimited, and free |
| Exposition | Show it | Characters may speak at length | Must be heard, which is the whole craft |
| Format | Standard screenplay, strictly | House styles vary, be consistent | Standard radio script, sound cues |
| UK route in | BBC Writersroom, production companies, agents | Theatre open submissions, literary departments | BBC Writersroom — the most open door there is |
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Screen: format is the entry exam
Screenplay format is not a style preference. Scene headings, action, character cue, parenthetical and dialogue have defined margins, and the convention exists because it makes a page equal roughly a minute of screen time.
A reader who receives a script in the wrong format concludes, correctly, that the writer does not know the industry — and frequently stops at page one.
The errors that get scripts put down: camera directions (we PAN across the room), four-line action paragraphs, parentheticals telling actors how to say every line, and interior thoughts a camera cannot photograph.
The full format guide is worth reading before you write, not after.
Stage: what a theatre can physically do
Stage writing is language-led in a way screen is not. A character may speak at length; an audience will listen in a way a film audience will not.
But the constraints are physical and they are real. How many actors? How many sets, and can they change in the dark in forty seconds? Can this be staged in a room above a pub, which is where most new plays actually happen?
A play with fourteen characters and six locations is a play nobody can afford to put on. A play with three actors and one room gets produced. That is not a compromise; it is the form, and some of the best plays in English are exactly that shape.
Radio: the most open door in Britain
Radio drama is the route new writers most often overlook and the one with the most genuine opportunity in the UK.
BBC Writersroom runs open windows for radio, unsolicited, with no agent required. It is one of the very few places in British broadcasting where a script from nobody in particular is genuinely read.
The craft is specific: everything must be audible. No pictures, no captions, no reaction shots. Location, time, who is present and what is happening all arrive through sound and speech — without the characters announcing them clumsily, which is the beginner's error.
Do it well and it is the most intimate dramatic form there is.
Structure, across all three
Something has to change, and it has to keep changing.
Whatever structural model you use — three acts, five, or none — the test is the same as any other book: take a scene out, and do the ones after it still work? If yes, it was not load-bearing.
For scripts there is a second test, which is time. A scene that plays for four minutes and moves nothing is four minutes an audience cannot get back, and unlike a reader they cannot skim.
Write the outline. Test it. Scripts are short enough that a structural fault is fatal rather than merely costly.
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For scripts, Mode Guards are the thing that makes the rest usable: element types and margins survive every pass, so nothing reflows dialogue into prose or loses a character cue. That is the failure mode of general writing tools applied to scripts, and it is silent until you look at page forty.
With that held, the rest works normally: Plan Feedback on the structure before you write, Detailed Editorial Feedback on whether the story works, Ask the Editor for the specific question, and a clean export at the end.
And you can speak dialogue rather than typing it — many writers find scenes come out better spoken, because dialogue is speech and the ear catches what the eye invents.
What a script editor still gives you: knowledge of what is being commissioned right now and whether your script fits any of it. £300–£1,200, and worth it for something going to producers.
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Email me my free Book Coach linkQuestions people ask
- How long should a screenplay be?
- 90–120 pages for a feature, at roughly a page a minute. UK television follows the slot: 28–32 pages for a half hour, 55–65 for an hour.
- Do I need screenwriting software?
- Not strictly, but it removes a whole category of formatting error and most options are free or cheap.
- How do I get a script read in the UK?
- BBC Writersroom is the most open door, particularly for radio. Theatre literary departments read open submissions. Film and TV largely go through agents and production companies.
- Should I write a spec script or an original?
- Original, for the UK. Spec scripts of existing shows are more of an American calling-card tradition.
- Can I write a play and a screenplay from the same idea?
- Yes, and adaptations between forms are common — but write them as separate works. A screenplay with a stage play's structure reads as neither.