Before Aaron Sorkin knew what a screenplay looked like, he wrote A Few Good Men on cocktail napkins. He was bartending at the Palace Theatre on Broadway, pouring drinks between shows, and scribbling dialogue on whatever he could find. He didn't write it as a screenplay first. He wrote it as a play, because that was the form he sort of understood, and when someone told him it could be a movie, he had to figure out what that even meant. The script sold. The movie got made. Jack Nicholson said the line. And Sorkin, by his own telling, still wasn't sure he knew what he was doing.
He's talked about this in interviews and in his MasterClass, and the thing he keeps coming back to isn't structure or format or three-act theory. It's something simpler: "Intention and obstacle. Somebody wants something, something's standing in their way." That's it. That's the engine. He writes by walking around and talking to himself, muttering lines of dialogue until they sound right, until the rhythm of the scene clicks into place in his mouth before it ever hits the page.
I bring this up because most screenwriting advice starts with format. Courier 12-point. Slug lines. INT. and EXT. The margin widths for dialogue blocks. And all of that matters eventually. But none of it is where a screenplay actually begins. A screenplay begins the same place every other piece of writing begins: with a person who wants something and can't quite get it.
The page looks different but the work doesn't
The first time you open a screenplay, it looks alien. All that white space. The capitalized scene headings. Character names centered above their dialogue. It feels like a legal document that somehow contains car chases. And there's a natural assumption that because the form looks so specific, the writing process must be equally technical, that you need to learn the machinery before you're allowed to tell a story.
Diablo Cody didn't get that memo. Before she wrote Juno, she was a blogger and a former stripper with zero Hollywood connections. No film school. No industry contacts. No one telling her what a proper screenplay was supposed to sound like. She just wrote the way she talked, which happened to be funny and sharp and unlike anything else circulating in agency mailrooms at the time. The script sold itself because the voice on the page was so distinct that readers couldn't put it down. She won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, and the lesson there isn't that format doesn't matter. It's that voice matters more.
If you've been writing regularly, doing daily practice, freewriting, working on fiction or essays or journal entries, you already have a voice. You might not think of it that way. But the rhythms you default to, the way you build a sentence, the kinds of details you notice, that's a voice, and it translates to the screen more directly than you'd think. Screenwriting isn't a departure from the writing you've been doing. It's another container for the same instincts.
Write one scene before you write a screenplay
There's a reason Barry Jenkins wrote Moonlight in a fever over a few weeks. He wasn't building an outline or hitting plot points on a beat sheet. He was adapting Tarell Alvin McCraney's unpublished play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, and what he cared about most was the feeling of each scene. His action lines read more like poetry than instruction. He writes with color and light, describing not just what happens but how it feels to be in the room when it happens.
That approach is worth borrowing, especially when you're starting out. Don't try to write a screenplay. Write a scene. One scene. Pick a moment you can see clearly in your head, two people in a room, and write what they say to each other and what they do while they're saying it. Don't worry about format. Don't worry about where it falls in the larger story. Just get the thing on the page.
Most screenwriting books won't tell you this, but a screenplay is really just a stack of scenes. If you can write one that feels alive, you can write another, and then another, and eventually they start to arrange themselves into something with shape. The shape matters and I'm not saying you can skip structure entirely, but the ability to write a single scene that breathes is the foundational skill, and everything else builds on top of it.