Illustration by the author.

The first rule of screenwriting is that it’s always formatted in 12-point Courier font—as if ejected from the typewriter of a gumshoe detective.

Beyond this, there are no rules. There are no necessary qualifications to screenwriting and no academically paywalled knowledge base. The requisite research is the substrate of our collective consciousness: movies. Have you seen a handful of these over the course of your life? Then you’ve probably internalized the basics and know in your gut how a story should unfold. Penning page after page of dialogue will feel effortless. Unlike other forms of writing, you needn’t worry about transitions or logical coherence. It’s, in essence, the same as playing with dolls.

I’ll admit it sounds too good to be true. How could screenwriting be both the veritable money-printer of the creative class and the discipline with the lowest barrier to entry? How could it give rise to the most powerful and affecting art form, cinema, from the most unvarnished everyday language? (And what qualifies me, a no-name hack, to tell you this?)

My pivot to screenwriting dates back to July 2023. The Hollywood writers’ strike was in full force, and the industry was at a standstill. As I understood it, major studios (increasingly “financialized” in their decision-making) were downsizing after COVID overspending and fighting ignominiously to replace human writers with robots. Yet somehow, despite the stagnation, screenwriting was in the air for my dilettante peers in New York. At every party I went to, I’d be privy to someone’s elevator pitch about a post-sixth-extinction meat critic or Osama bin Laden’s imagined days at Oxford. Perhaps the decline of the midbudget movie was creating an enticing vortex of unfulfilled creative promise. Perhaps there was a touch of “scab” opportunism during the strike. The one thing everyone agreed on was that the bar had never been lower.

Around then, my friend Hana showed me a draft of her screenplay “The Silver Spiral,” about a fashion intern who encounters an evil hypnotist, in the colorful symbolist mold of Dario Argento. After listening to my feedback (show, don’t tell that the parrot has a goiter), she invited me to brainstorm another set of film ideas. If we could cook up a sufficiently “high-concept” premise, our script might get bought up by an eager indie production company.

I was hesitant, as I’m far from a cinephile. A lack of familiarity with the conventions of organized crime renders much of the canon unintelligible to me. But if my peers weren’t discouraged, why should I be?

Step 1: Finding a Concept

A movie needs a premise. First, come up with a list of narrative tropes. For example:

• Ensemble drama
• Society with creatures of different scales
• Screwball comedy
• Hangout movie
• Shrink-ray film
• Rags to riches
• Riches to rags

Maybe one of these genres gels with a personal fixation or painful memory, in which case the project can creep along the long shadow of catharsis. If not, you can make a play for relevance. What kind of film is being demanded right now? What general topics are in the air?

• Technocrat island nation
• Satisfying videos
• Attachment styles (anxious/secure/avoidant)

Next, combine the genre with a topical idea. You’ll end up with amalgamations like:

• Brooklyn vs. Manhattan comedy of manners
• Myers-Briggs ensemble dramedy: someone from every type
• Eerie small town / Timothée Chalamet plays every role in a fat suit
• Claymation slice-of-life movie about steroid abuse (you can show the character’s physical transformation with an aggregation of clay)

If you’re having difficulty choosing, go with the most totalizing creative constraints. Your first film won’t have a big budget.

Hana and I used this principle to hone down our respective brainstorms to two options. The first was Hana’s idea, for a road movie about an unhinged teen babygoth/scene couple who run away together, based on the misadventures of actual Providence mall rats. There would be a structuring tension between the girl’s urge to take selfies in front of scenic views and the guy’s burgeoning urge to push her off a cliff.

My concept was “lost-media Rashomon.”

Hana asked me what that would entail.

“YouTubers are obsessed with lost media … with describing a game, movie, or show from childhood they can’t get hold of or identify, and then playing up the eeriness of these intangible memories,” I explained. “Rashomon refers to narratives where the same story, often a crime, is told from multiple conflicting perspectives. So if you combine the two, the same lost media is remembered from multiple viewpoints, with each person distorting the details of their recollection to prove their innocence.”

Hana thought it had potential. We hashed out some preliminaries: the film would take the form of a police interrogation ten years after a thirteen-year-old girl named Peregrine disappears from an idyllic New Jersey suburb. The lost media in question would be an MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) that Peregrine and her friends used to play together. Despite figuring prominently in her friends’ original alibis, no trace of the game’s existence can be found online.

“What I like about this idea,” said Hana, pragmatically, “is that all of the interrogation scenes could be filmed in one location.”

“Lost-media Rashomon” was now locked into place as our high-concept pitch.

Step 2: The Treatment

Once you’ve settled on a premise, the next step is expanding it into a treatment: a ten-page plot summary written in the present tense.

Start by schematizing a well-differentiated cast of characters. For example, Jacques Prévert based the four suitors in his masterpiece Children of Paradise (1945)—an actor, a criminal, a duke, and a mime—on actual historic French individuals who lived during the 1820s. The men differ in class background and communication style: the actor is loquacious, the criminal has literary inclinations but often resorts to violence, the duke lets his wealth speak for him, and the mime is a man of action. Because the suitors are so clearly distinguished, their unfolding love stories with the same woman, Garance, never feel redundant. Characters can also be derived from typologies like Myers-Briggs that map out a comprehensive array of contrasting personality traits. (Remember to include at least one bland “everyman” character as a metaphoric stand-in for the viewer.)

Hana and I invented our suspects in one sitting by pairing different middle school personality types with niche video game genres. Each character would remember the gameplay style of the missing MMORPG subjectively. Stanley Kubrick said to make a movie, you must construct “six to eight non-submersible units,” or standalone story sequences that could be relinked to form a film, so we broke the story into six vignettes.

Next, you must determine the arc of the plot. Plots are often conveyed in vaguely thermodynamic terms, as a matter of forces, reactions, and mounting and dissipating pressures. I wanted to focus on one device in particular: the shocking twist.

How do you engineer a twist? Think back to “mind-bending” puzzle-box movies like Oldboy or Saltburn. In these films, we watch the story unfold in a state of innocence, then (spoiler alert) a carefully orchestrated conspiracy is revealed, and finally the events are shown played back again in light of the puppet masters pulling the strings. (Note that once the twists are revealed, the dramatic tension evaporates and the remaining scenes play out mechanistically.) The events that make up a twist must be overdetermined, or produced by multiple causes. The first time the viewer watches a scenario play out, they grasp only cause A (the basic reason) and learn only later of cause B (the twist), so cause A and B must be independently plausible. Cause A might be a mission borne of free will and cause B, a ruinous scheme giving the false impression of free will, as in Oldboy, but that’s just one option for the parallax between A and B. Metaphysical thrillers like Donnie Darko demonstrate other possibilities for twisting through sudden distortions of space and time. Donnie takes a wormhole back to the beginning of his own story to be crushed to death by a falling jet engine, a sacrifice that circumvents the collapse of forked reality. These films, by inventing a closed, melodramatic feedback loop, play on the idea of karma as cybernetics.

Recursion is the crux of these puzzle-box films, but all Hollywood movies rely on well-integrated callbacks. The Chekhov’s gun principle of setup and payoff is just another form of overdetermined twist. The special plot element, or “gun,” must serve a dual function, contributing to character development, humor, atmosphere, or visual intrigue the first time it is shown before reappearing at a pivotal moment in the story. (Doesthedogdie.com catalogs cinema’s most common foreshadowing trope, the death of a pet previsaging deaths to come.)

With these ideas in mind, Hana and I came up with two mysterious in-game entities—a shape-shifting monster and the missing girl’s reconstructed bedroom—which could take on different functions throughout the film.

For example, the depressive girl Sophie lets it slip during interrogation that she has constructed a version of her missing friend Peregrine’s bedroom online. She at first claims to have built the room to reenact Peregrine’s domestic routines, calling it “the work of mourning.” In actuality (twist!), it was built by her friends to practice a To Catch a Predator–style sting operation, luring predators from the game back to Peregrine’s house to apprehend them. Things went drastically wrong when they executed this plan in real life.  But ALSO (double twist!), the game was originally coded as a “euthanasia simulator,” using harvested data to emulate the experience of premature death. Sophie was shown a predictive visualization of Peregrine’s murder in the bedroom prior to her disappearance and felt guilty for ignoring it.

Our story floated both the sting operation and the euthanasia simulator as potential parallel truths. I didn’t see any reason to commit to either one.

“The viewers will be okay with ambiguity,” I insisted.

Hana disagreed. “They’re going to be unsatisfied. What are we trying to say here?”

I thought back to the first time I felt like I genuinely understood a movie’s plot. I had come down with a terrible case of COVID and decided to kill time by finally watching Mulholland Drive. For years I had been struggling to follow along with movies in which heroes and villains weren’t clearly color coded. This time was different. Line for line, image for image, every element of the movie made sense to me, in relation to the overarching gestalt. The shadowy, prophetic figures and drawn-out jump scares were perfectly calibrated, foreshadowing themselves in real time. There was reality in the dream bits, dream in the reality bits. By the time the film was over, I was choking back tears of joy. Finally, here was a film I understood.

Once recovered from my illness, I learned Mulholland Drive was famous for its ambiguity, and no one understood it, not even David Lynch. My brain fog must have seeped into the cracks in the narrative, creating a false holism. Others tried to make sense of it using a different tack: I discovered a 2000s fan site that meticulously catalogued every painting, lampshade, coffee mug, and piece of jewelry shown on screen, in hope some hidden pattern would emerge to resolve the mysteries. Clearly, you could craft a masterpiece out of red herrings and Chekhov’s water pistols, so long as everything was shot through with allegorical significance.

Hana and I tabled the question of the ending for the time being, and with that, our treatment was complete.

Step 3: The Screenplay

Now that you’ve come up with your characters and plot, you’re ready to move on to a full-blown screenplay. Hana and I divvied up the scenes to work on separately. I felt confident—in fact, I had begun spreading the gospel with MLM-like enthusiasm.

“It’s free money,” I told my friend during a subway ride. “It’s as easy as watching TV in your head or playing with dolls.”

“Excuse me,” said a well-dressed woman seated to my left. “I couldn’t help but overhear you talking about screenwriting. I review screenplays for a living, and it’s a common misconception that there’s no craft to it. Film is a visual medium, so the first thing I look for in a script is …”

The woman was startled by my flippancy, I guess. I was embarrassed but undeterred.

Before I began writing, Hana gave me a quick primer on formatting. The convention is to start each sequence with a description of the characters, the setting, and the unfolding scenario. Characters’ looks are usually only vaguely described (as “beautiful” or “handsome”), to allow for different casting options. You should place particular emphasis on directional lighting, weather conditions, the topology of the land, and/or other factors that contribute to atmosphere. (Fog is an ally of low-budget filmmakers everywhere.) Writer/director Peter Greenaway provides a painterly example, from the script of 1988’s Drowning by Numbers:

The slow track back ends across the road where a shallow puddle reflects the terraced row of houses and the stars in the deep ultramarine sky. Beside the puddle, stuck in the mud, is a stake sloppily painted or sprayed with chrome yellow paint … some of the paint has spattered on the ashy ground roundabout.

As an auteur writer/director, Greenaway has the liberty to map out his camerawork. But according to Hana, the average screenwriter isn’t allowed to invoke types of shots, as it bristles the director’s ego. Specifications about line delivery are also typically kept to short parentheticals, to grant the actors room for interpretation. Greenaway likes “(Peevishly),” “(With studied indifference),” and “(Unperturbed).”

I locked myself in my bedroom and got started. I let slight variations of each scenario play out over and over in my head until something clicked into place. Screenwriting, I decided, was maladaptive daydreaming set to the rhythm of cliché.

One scene I had picked to complete was the police interrogation of Joseph, the former debate kid. His narration style was based on a rationalist Substack, the writings of Silicon Valley–based individuals who use utilitarianism and game theory concepts to bolster their opinionated blog posts. The world, for Joseph, can be understood as a series of interrelated markets. He rehashes his memories in terms of incentivizing agents, emergent properties, and consensus mechanisms:

[DETECTIVE BROWN slides forward the DNA report on Peregrine’s remains.]

DETECTIVE BROWN: As far as we know, the perp is still out there.

JOSEPH: I’m actually less concerned with her physical suffering in those last days—not to trivialize human suffering. But what bothers me, what racks me to the core, is her lost potential. Because the value proposition of a child is pure potential.

But when a friend of mine assembled a few actors to do a cold reading of the script, it was immediately evident that I’d crammed five times too many words into each sentence, compared with the normal cadence of film dialogue:

SOPHIE (voiceover): Fumbling around for the right sheet music to take to choir … A knot in her hair, resisting combing … Dysphoria striking at the mirror … I would go back to it every day as a routine. This was the work of mourning, even though it was kid’s game.

Maybe that was okay, as the conceit required constant narration and reminiscence. I was just happy to finish my homework. As my friend later commented, screenwriting isn’t easy; playing with dolls is just hard.

Step 4: Script Feedback

Your screenplay has come a long way from the desultory brainstorm you started with. You’ve translated your very consciousness into a series of stark images. You’ve suffused the dialogue with punchiness and subtle irony. But how much of your internal world comes across on the page? How well have you struck the balance between implicit and explicit storytelling? It’s time to seek out some constructive feedback.

Hana and I compiled our scenes into one script titled Alta Arcadia and sent it to three of our thoughtful peers (C., D., and E.). All three reviewers had some gripes.

C and E took issue with the character of the depressive girl, Sophie. Admittedly, Hana and I hadn’t quite sorted her out. We’d thought about making her a victim of trauma, like virtually every horror-movie protagonist of the twenty-first century. Hana suggested Sophie be a period-specific “class traitor” whose investment-banker father was jailed during the Occupy movement, leading her to resort to stealing to keep up appearances. This would put a target on her back in the eyes of the cops. The heated, accusatory exchanges between her and the police that Hana was suggesting didn’t gel with the more poetically inflected sequences I had in mind for the character, but I hoped she would come together on the page. “Sometime in the middle of the script, there is a switch in Sophie that I don’t completely understand,” C. noted. The midscript personality “switch” was an artifact of a common mistake: reverse engineering Sophie as a plot device without reupholstering over her nuts and bolts.

C., D., and E. all felt that Alta Arcadia failed to deliver on the conventions of the police procedural, lacking three-dimensional antihero cops or a concrete conclusion substantiated by forensics. As D. wrote,

The mystery at play is fascinating and twofold: (1) What happened to Peregrine? (2) What is or was Alta Arcadia, the lost video game? In terms of suspense, the second mystery functions better than the first. The game builds slowly, reveals more aspects of itself, narrows, and becomes as clear as it can be, which is not very clear at all! And this works great. But the mystery of what happened to Peregrine does not have the same build or puzzle-solving quality to it.

What would enhance this is a slower-burn approach to the mystery. Can the detectives’ suspicions travel, weaken, strengthen as the evidence accretes, becomes more winding, more confused? Can their frustration build rather than remaining static or erupting cartoonishly? Can our suspicions, as viewers, travel in tandem with theirs as new if incomplete evidence unfolds in this dusty cold case?

Seeing the sheer quantity of problems laid out was disheartening. But it wasn’t yet too late to save Alta Arcadia from the fabled depths of “development hell.”

Step 5: Story

Your feedback round may have revealed some alarming blind spots, but don’t lose hope—deus ex machinas can take many forms. I decided to pin my hopes on a Screenwriting 101–style guidebook. I chose Story by Robert McKee, a screenwriting legend who was once portrayed—with crackling gravitas—by Brian Cox in the 2002 movie Adaptation.

I read Story curled up on the couch while I was babysitting. A kids’ movie droned on in the background, ping-ponging between familiar narrative beats.

McKee’s position is that storytelling is fundamentally meaningful. Writers shape stories around “a perception of what’s worth living for, what’s worth dying for, what’s foolish to pursue, the meaning of justice, truth—the essential values.” When it comes to the art/entertainment divide, McKee exalts the latter because of its didactic potential. The “Classical” Hollywood story design, in which characters grow and circumstances improve irreversibly, American dream–style, is thus preferable to the arc of the European art film, in which history repeats itself amid a beautifully composed mise-en-scène.

Of experimental filmmakers, he blusters:

Just as children break things for fun or throw tantrums to force attention on themselves, too many filmmakers use infantile gimmicks on screen to shout, “Look what I can do!” A mature artist never calls attention to himself, and a wise artist never does anything merely because it breaks convention.

I had always been taught that technical experimentation is essential to the development of any artistic medium. My favorite film, Mothlight by Stan Brakhage, shows that brilliant filmmaking requires no budget, nor even a camera, just the kind of shriveled organic detritus you might find for free in a windowsill. The film consists of a collage of insect wings and other organic matter sandwiched between Mylar tape and run through a projector. To put it philosophically, Mothlight enacts a nonhuman temporality, like the desirous flicker in the mind’s eye of a frog. Temporal and textural experimentation lend film the power to transcend human experience. But McKee, it seemed, cared only about humans.

Despite this point of contention, I felt aligned with McKee’s project. It was clear I had been swayed by the cause-and-effect-driven twentieth-century Oscar bait of it all. Well-structured storytelling, I proselytized to Hana, is a dying art, being outpaced by mood-board-y vibe cinema, shaggy-dog-story “nothing” content, and lowest-common-denominator AI-generated bedtime stories.

Plot-driven films aren’t necessarily formulaic, either. McKee avoids including archetypal templates like “the hero’s journey,” which (in its kitschified version) dictates a story beat by beat. Structure should instead vary based on subject matter and extend from the idiosyncratic “personality and worldview of the writer.”

Alongside these moral convictions, Story contains a useful bag of tricks for script doctoring. I began strategizing about ways to turn my script’s inconsistencies into intentional ambiguities.

McKee talks about protagonists a lot throughout the book—not only the unwitting protagonist thrust into greatness but also the psychoanalytically-imbued school of protagonists whose true object of desire is unknown to themselves. A section on “three-dimensional” characters caught my eye.

Consider Hamlet, the most complex character ever written. Hamlet isn’t three-dimensional, but ten, twelve, virtually uncountably dimensional. He seems spiritual until he’s blasphemous. To Ophelia he’s first loving and tender, then callous, even sadistic. He’s courageous, then cowardly. At times he’s cool and cautious, then impulsive and rash.

The protagonist needs to be the most complex character in a work because “dimensions fascinate.” (If the villain is the most dimensional character, as in Blade Runner, the film is doomed to cult status.)

I wondered if this rule could apply to depressive Sophie. Perhaps we could run with a series of contradictory traits: compassionate yet calculating, self-deprecating yet accomplished, class traitor yet class clown, technocratic yet Faraday-caged … She could encapsulate that feeling from middle school in which the world becomes an absurdist, never-ending series of inside jokes, which no theory of mind could hope to apprehend. (Alternate film title: Through a Side Bang Darkly.)

I was also drawn to McKee’s list of bittersweet ironic conclusions, like “He gets at last what he always wanted … but too late to have it” or “He’s pushed further and further from his goal … only to discover that in fact he’s been led right to it.” They function not only as watered-down models of desire as a constitutive void but also as feedback loops. Filling in the blanks for our storytelling purposes, I came up with a new formulation: “Sophie wanted to protect Peregrine above all else, but in doing so, she hastened her friend’s demise.” Ergo, Sophie’s attempt to track Peregrine’s real-life location to keep her safe during the sting operation ends up revealing her location to a gang of hackers.

Another longstanding issue was the ending, where Joseph and Sophie give conflicting testimonials about the game’s role in Peregrine’s disappearance (sting operation vs. euthanasia simulator), with no reconciliation between them. I had a revelation that this scenario paralleled the prisoner’s dilemma, the classic pop-psychological thought experiment and typical Survivor cliffhanger. It would create a “confluence of content and form,” as McKee puts it, for Joseph and Sophie to purposefully betray each other in a game-theoretic mode. Joseph reveals Sophie’s role in orchestrating the sting operation, while Sophie ousts Joseph’s in-game suicide cult. Both characters choose self-interest over their collective well-being, leading to the worst overall outcome but bringing the cops closer to the truth.

One culminating betrayal would be the substitute teacher Mr. Jensen’s betrayal of his former employer Xetaplexis, the company behind Alta Arcadia.

Jensen confesses that Alta Arcadia was actually developed by Xetaplexis as an organ trafficking social network, designed to connect organ donors with their future organ recipients. Organs cannot legally be bought and sold, but they can be given as gifts between matching donors. The game (through manipulative tactics, such as biometric syncing and death simulations)produces a parasocial bond of “adoration” which legalizes organ donation. Peregrine was targeted for her rare blood type and kidnapped by organ traffickers when her location was leaked.

Cliché though it is, an organ-trafficking twist could become the plot’s terminus point, orienting the web of bodily forensic clues our reviewers had called for.

With these changes, Hana and I were several steps further into reforming our script from Swiss cheese to a Swiss watch–like puzzle-box narrative. Could Alta Arcadia succeed as a meticulously plotted rebuttal to nothing content and vibe cinema? Or was it cleverly folding streamer-adjacent antinarrative forces into the most mainstream possible narrative format, the police procedural? How did this pitch look to insider eyes?

Bonus Step: Insider Feedback

I soon found out the definitive answer. Hana got the edited treatment into the hands of someone who had worked for the indie film director who was my favorite as a tween. His production company was apparently on the lookout for inventive treatments to option. While it sounded too good to be true, I waited with bated breath.

After a month, Hana finally texted:

“[Liaison/son of another, even more famous Hollywood director] says he thinks our work is too plot-driven and psychological for [famous art house director].”

“David Fincher, wya?” I texted back. After my McKee-ification, were we too mainstream to go the art house route at all?

Hana continued,

[Liaison] says that two things make it really hard to sell.

1. Movies with large amounts of animation are actually harder to sell. Animation is more expensive than cheap live-action sequences.

2. Movies that sell are “show, not tell.” “Talky” movies centered around conversations and dialogue rather than action are known for being unprofitable.

I became defensive. I suppose a lot of the influences—rationalist Substacks, esoteric nineties video games, watered-down psychoanalysis—were more verbal than visual. But narration was inherent to the conceit. It would have been much easier to start with a focus on cheaply filmed action than to tease lost-media Monitor Horror into a techno-noir police procedural.

“In my mind, it was supposed to be commercial!!!” I texted.

The liaison also suggested we “make the video game scenes stylized live-action scenes with animated elements. Like eXistenZ, Scott Pilgrim, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” But wasn’t Who Framed Roger Rabbit? one of the most legendarily labor-intensive postproduction nightmares of all time?

I longed, briefly, to see the world through his eyes. (The gossamer threads of elaborate contrivance simply brushed away.)

***

The feedback session inspired a familiar pang of outside-looking-in frustration. A theory occurred to me for what Alta Arcadia might have subconsciously been about.

Reconstructing the lost game could be a metaphor for any creative process. The team pools all of its resources, trying to reverse engineer what they think the scene? the market? the gatekeepers? want the product to be. Rather than trusting our intuition, we accept a slew of design-by-committee compromises. We glue ourselves to attention-economy analytics like rapt PC gamers. We come to view our creations with the detachment of a Joseph-esque “rational agent,” strategizing to optimize our chances for green flags. And yet somehow, it’s still off the mark. In the end the team has come up with nothing, beyond a vaguely conspiratorial aura.