I have to hold my hand up, I'm a bit of a purist when it comes to screenplay formatting. Screenplay format seems arbitrary. Courier font? Specific margins? FADE IN and FADE OUT? Who cares?
Everyone who reads screenplays professionally, that's who. And getting format wrong is the fastest way to have your script dismissed, unread.
The one-page-one-minute rule
Standard screenplay format exists for a practical reason: one page roughly equals one minute of screen time.
This isn't magic — it's calibration. The margins, the font, the spacing all evolved to make this approximation work. A properly formatted 100-page script will produce roughly a 100-minute film.^
This means format is a tool. Experienced readers can flip through a script and know, from the page count and the balance of action to dialogue, what kind of film they're looking at.
Break the format and you break the tool.
What readers actually see
A reader opens your script. Before they read a word of story, they see:
- Is it in proper format?
- How dense are the action blocks?
- How much white space is there?
- How long are the dialogue speeches?
Within seconds, they're making judgments. Right or wrong, format signals professionalism. A badly formatted script says: this writer doesn't know what they're doing.
You might be a genius. Your story might be brilliant. But you've just made it harder for anyone to discover that.
The basics
Scene headings (sluglines): INT. or EXT., location, time of day.
INT. COFFEE SHOP - DAY
Action lines: Present tense, what we see and hear. Short paragraphs – preferably one shot per line (see below).
Character names: In caps, above their dialogue.
Dialogue: Narrower margins than action.
Parentheticals: Use sparingly. Only when absolutely necessary to clarify delivery, actors don't like being told how to deliver lines.
Transitions: FADE IN at the start (left aligned), FADE OUT at the end. Never use CUT TO: - cuts are implied by a new line or scene heading.
What software to use
Use proper screenwriting software. Final Draft is the industry standard. Highland, WriterSolo, and Fade In are good alternatives. Even free options like my little web-based app Uninflected will handle format correctly.
Do not try to fake format in Word. You'll get it wrong, and it will show.
One shot per line
This is a trick that many writers miss. It's easy to write something like:
Alice paces the room. She checks her watch – it's 1:58pm. She sighs and starts pacing again.
Now think about it from a director and cinematographer's perspective. They both have to break it down and think about what shots are needed. Yes, they're fairly obvious here, but not always, especially in a dense block of action. That a) takes time, and b) means your vision is open to interpretation, expansion or reduction because you forced them to think.
But if you follow the one shot per line rule, it would come out like this:
Alice paces the room. She checks her watch.It's 1:58pm.She sighs and starts pacing again.
Now each shot is clear, and the type of shot also often presents itself: Wide, Close-up, Medium close-up.
The reader more clearly visualises the shots. The director and cinematographer don't have to think; they can focus on getting just those shots. And because they didn't think about it, your vision remains intact, production time drops and producers are happy.
Win-Win-Win-Win.
The deeper point
Format isn't bureaucracy. It's communication.
A screenplay is a technical document. It needs to convey information efficiently to many different readers — producers, directors, actors, department heads. Format conventions exist because they work. They make scripts readable, comparable, and useful as production documents.
Learn the format. Then forget about it — let the software handle it while you focus on story.
^ The big caveat that people never mention with this one-minute-per-page rule is that there is a difference between letter and A4 sized paper. A4 is fatter and longer than letter, so while the one page a minute rule holds for letter, A4 (in my experience) can add up to 10 seconds.
Over the course of a 120-page screenplay, that's quite a lot of hidden bloat. If you're British, just remember to switch between letter and A4 in the page settings every so often, so you can quickly see the difference in page count.