The 3 Steps to Screenwriting Fluency

Screenwriting is a learnable skill. But only if you don't skip any of the steps. Read on for a deep dive of each habit you need to incorporate to master the craft!

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No matter what skill you want to master, you should be actively learning, immersing, and applying at the same time.

This applies screenwriting too.

(And you can’t hope to become a professional screenwriter until you actually master the craft of screenwriting).

For comparison, think about a more structured and obvious skill: learning a language.

Talk to any expert and they will tell you that learning a language requires three key components:

Step #1 - Immersion

Immersion is being surrounded by the language, hearing it everywhere, and experiencing it, even before you fully understand it.

This is why so many foreign language teachers recommend study abroad programs that throw you in the deep end, surrounded by locals who only speak their own language and very little English.

This speeds up the learning process because your brain starts thinking that it's really important to your survival as a human to be able speak this language. Humans are social creatures and communication is essential to our survival.

If your brain thinks knowing a language is essential to surviving, it will learn it faster.

Photo by Annika Gordon on Unsplash

Step #2 - Practice

You can't actually learn how to speak in a language until you... practice speaking in that language.

Speaking challenges your brain to recall vocabulary. It forces you to conjugate verbs in your head before you speak. In struggling to string sentences together, you put what you've learned into practice. Even making mistakes and having native speakers correct you helps you get better because the embarrassment you feel in that moment burns the lesson into your brain forever.

Before you think you are ready, you should practice speaking the language you’re learning.

Step #3 - Active Learning

In theory, you could become fluent in a language with the right amount of immersion and practice.

After all, that's how all babies learned their native languages.

But this process takes forever, and our brains aren't as spongey as they were when we were babies. So if you don't want to keep making the same grammar mistakes over and over again for the rest of your life, you need to attend classes, take lessons, or speak with a tutor who can give you structured exercises.

In this way you learn the rules of the language so you can start hearing those rules in your immersion and practicing them in your speaking.

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

You can't skip any of these components.

If you learn and immerse but don't practice, you become someone who "understands better than they speak," and that doesn't count as fluency.

If you immerse and practice, you'll be able to get by in an emergency, but your conversations will always be a struggle, and you won't feel that satisfaction that comes from mastery.

Actively learn and practice but don't immerse, and your progress will be very slow.

It's those hours and hours of exposure that open you up to the ways native speakers manipulate the language in beautiful ways to communicate all the big ideas that you want to communicate one day.

I hope you can see how this process applies to screenwriting:

Step #1 - Immersion

You should watch and read as many movies and TV shows as you can.

You should be on as many notes calls, around as many sets, or involved in as much of the process as possible. You should take it all in and notice how different people "speak" the language of screenwriting, filmmaking, and storytelling with varying degrees of success.

Immerse yourself in the art by getting a job in the industry.

Or create your own immersion by spending multiple hours every day watching, reading, and absorbing screenwriting.

Step #2 - Practice

Before you are ready, before you are an expert, before you know everything there is to know, you should write a script.

It can be a short film, a pilot, or a feature. But writing is the best way to fully crystallize what you're learning. As you run into problems, you’ll start to appreciate how other filmmakers solve them. As you learn theory, you will try (and fail) to put it into practice.

Your scripts will not be good when you first start.

But they won’t get better unless you keep writing.

Step #3 - Active Learning

Just like with speaking a new language, you will never become great at screenwriting if you try to do so by yourself in a vacuum.

At best, you’ll hit a plateau, frustrated by your lack of success.

At worst, you’ll end up with deeply ingrained bad habits that will take years to unlearn.

And you’ll probably end up blaming the gatekeepers for not wanting to take a chance on new writers like you. I see this every single day. This industry is cutthroat. No one owes you a chance, and no one will give you one. You earn chances by showing up with material that gets people legitimately excited to meet with you and pay you to write for them.

Many writers take pride in being “self-taught.”

But this is silly. There is no bonus for never having taken a class or never having learned from a mentor.

All the greats learned from those who came before them.

You want to be great? Humble yourself, and take a structured class.

It’s only in challenging your weaknesses and turning them into strengths that you will become a strong enough writer to open up doors for yourself with your writing.

The good news is that you don’t need to do this sequentially!

You don’t need to wait until you’re an expert to work on that script. You get to constantly be in a state of learning, appreciating, and iterating.

There will be different times in your life where you are prioritizing one of these three more than the other two. That’s just how things go. Nothing will ever be in perfect balance.

But in some form, you should always be absorbing, practicing, and learning.

You won’t notice the day you become fluent.

But one day you will have a full conversation about screenplay story in a professional capacity. You will be working, paid for your knowledge, and viewed by your collaborators as an expert.

It will happen without you noticing it. Suddenly, you will be there looking back at how far you’ve come.

Just like with language, it takes forever to get to this place.

But it will happen if you stay consistent with it.