3 Ways To Decide If Your Screenplay Is Ready To Show The World

This is the existential crisis facing many screenwriters. Should you write just one more draft? One more polish? Sleep on it? Or should you just hit the send button and let the script gods decide?

If you wait, are you simply moving words around like a game of Wordle or really digging deep into your story to make it the best it can be? This is what script readiness means.

It boils down to two components – the story concept and your screenplay
The first one is easier to tackle. Is your film idea big enough to be a movie? If not, no amount of screenwriting craft, feedback, or rewrites will help your script.

Cocaine Bear was written by Jimmy Warden and he really swung for the fences with a stunt script which he never thought would ever get made. He figured it would only get him talked about. His movie title was the pitch, the logline, and the plot all rolled into a single growling film. The title instantly conjures up a highly-entertaining film. The “inspired by true events” adds to its cinematic allure.

Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story is a prequel mini-series mapped into the Bridgeton universe. Although the pitch ignites interest (especially from Bridgerton fans) and a sense of conflict when a young Queen Charlotte is unwillingly betrothed to King George, it is ultimately an execution-dependent character study. It couldn’t simply ride on the coat tails of Bridgerton and expect to be a hit. 

These are the three key areas writers should consider before hitting their proverbial send button.

1) Hook

A hook is the bait that will invite audience to engage with your story. It’s the first step to getting your screenplay read. The second step is to get them to read it to the end.

Cocaine Bear undoubtedly has an addictive hook that raises interest, curiosity, intrigue, and even, amusement. The hook immediately asks its audience to postulate a possible trajectory for this story without reading a single scene.

A lack of a strong hook means the audience is not sufficiently invested to care how the story might play out. The story may not big “cinematic” enough, universal enough, or even bug enough to excite an audience.

A hook isn’t the be all and end all to a great script. It can certainly pique industry interest, but it won’t necessarily sustain that sugar rush. There still needs to be a satisfying story to underpin it. A more outlandish hook might garner more initial attention, but it won’t save your story if it’s lacking in basic story components.

Queen Charlotte, on the other hand, also relies on a hook – or dare we say – gimmick to draw in the audience; albeit to a lesser extent. Shonda Rhimes cleverly expanded the Bridgerton universe into an epic tale where “love can blossom in the thorniest of gardens.”

A hook isn’t confined to the big idea. It also relates to a writer’s take on the material and their unique perspective of the world. Wes Anderson certainly has his personal prism to tell his quirky stories in a way few others can.

To hook or not to hook isn’t a binary question. A hook also relates to how a particular film or television show fits in with its peers. What might attract an audience to Charlotte as opposed to another stuffy royal drama?

A useful place to start testing your hook is by looking at common genre tropes and subverting them. Audiences require a sense of familiarity even when they demand something completely different. Just don’t push them over the edge because you might lose them for good.

For example, a heist film is typically built around a team with each member having a specific area of expertise. They may not particularly like each other, but they’re professional enough to put those differences aside until the job is complete. What if a member was deaf, or blind – and they relied on their other senses to drive the getaway car? Normally, they might find someone else. But what if this getaway driver was Formula One material?

2) Main Character(s)

Another cardinal sin of character screenwriting is not having a discernible main character with a clear goal and conflict they must wrestle with during the story. Even ensemble pieces have a main character audiences can follow. Otherwise, readers are simply lost in a story garden wandering around until someone grabs their interest.

Stories with exalted characters announcing lofty philosophical concepts without illustrating who they are will struggle to perform. Such stories become casualties of the writer’s ego because they don’t easily connect with audiences.

Under-developed drafts may show a character with a clear goal, such as making the basketball team, but don’t fully utilize story obstacles and stakes. Firstly, we need to understand why they want something so badly, who and why someone is blocking them, and what are the worst consequences of failure. Aside from not fully mining these story elements to a reader, under-developed drafts frequently set the bar so low that the consequence of not achieving their goal is little more than an inconvenience or a bruised ego.

Your main character must say “I MUST HAVE” rather than “I WOULD LIKE.” These emotional thrusters must be set to overdrive to ensure your screenplay is truly ready for circulation.

Your main character must be intriguing enough to captivate your audience. They may display an unusual character trait in the way they live their everyday lives. The may have OCD and wash their hands a hundred times a day to the point of bleeding. Or they may be a stickler for time that the mere thought of being late sends them into a panic and gives them heart palpitations.

Supporting characters should also be consequential to the main character’s goal. Otherwise they’re just passengers on a train. They should bring the main character closer to or further from their goal. They must provide interaction and impact.

3) Emotion

This is probably the most significant aspect of story that makes readers decide whether to turn the page or stop reading. Emotion is tied to entertainment. It can arise from laughter, tears, fear, or being thrilled. The structural elements of a story can be taught more easily, but creating raw emotion to provide a satisfying journey for your audience is a sure sign of a writer’s skill.

When you do a final pass of screenplay, consider if any of emotional elements can be boosted. Can a scene be made more thrilling, a joke more laugh-out-loud funny, or can you make your audiences tear up so much, they need an entire box of tissues?

These three elements of storytelling also need grounding in human reality to make your screenplay work. They need soft, quiet moments to offset the heightened emotions experience by characters and audience alike. Humans aren’t designed for sustained emotional attack. There are emotional peaks and troughs before settling into equilibrium. Then that equilibrium is disrupted in the following scene.