After spending twenty plus years in professional writing rooms with Academy Award winning writers, directors and producers, I learned one very important lesson:

 

There is no “right” way to write a screenplay. 

 

The only “right” way to write a screenplay is to finish a draft, have a table read, get notes and then make the next draft better. If you google “how to write a screenplay”, you will get suggestions for dozens of screenwriting books promoting structure templates, outlines, story maps, etc. I want you to know they are all saying the same thing with different words, and they are all valid.

 

Become familiar with the most popular templates and story maps. Mix and match them if you’d like, treat them as tools in a tool box, use whatever tool makes sense to you and helps you tell a great story.

 

BUT! The second most important lesson that I learned in these professional writing rooms was the order in which they implemented these tools. A system that over and over again yielded well written screenplay after screenplay. This is the system I am sharing with you now.

 

My mission, the reason I founded writing BY structure, is to spread the word that professional writers don’t worry about screenplay format (act breaks and page count), they worry about whether or not their story works. And more importantly: they consider finding story, plotting and writing, three different processes that need to be worked on separately.   

 

This concept, finding your story first, then plotting and then writing, is what the 16 Step System is based on. It will help you separate these three stages of screenwriting clearly, so you can, not just “write a screenplay”, but write a screenplay with a cathartic story and a plot with no holes, culminating in a first draft that is table-read ready, over and over again.