I have a couple of tricks that help me get unstuck and write quickly. THREAD #screencraft #screenwriting

The first is I write slug lines for scenes that are what the scene is for. So instead of INT. DINER - DAY I'll write JACK AND JOE FIGHT WHILE EATING PIE and then I'll just list the things that happen in that scene. No dialogue - unless I have an idea - just THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS.

If I'm stuck on a character, I'll open up a new document and have them monologue on a subject that they have a strong opinion on. That way, I'm not writing for a scene, I'm just letting them talk. If I find something useful, great, but mostly it's trying to find who they are.

If I'm stuck on dialogue, I'll sometimes do an "on the nose" version of the dialogue. Super emotional, no subtext, not being precious. Just "this is the gist of what they are saying." It helps to have the "bad words" out there, so I can think "well, how would I say that better?"

When I know I could spend a lot of time going down the rabbit hole of research, I'll put the letters "TK" in for an object, song, etc. (s/o to @MikeStandish). At the end of the vomit draft, I sub out those placeholder letters for ACTUAL research (after I've finished).

Similarly, if I know I want a joke, but I don't want to burn 1/2 hour finding the perfect one, I'll put "TK JOKE HERE."

And my biggest go-to for speed is to open up a plain text app like Notes or SimpleNote, etc and write dialogue. Every time I hit return, it's a new speaker. This gets ALL the busywork of screenwriting out of the way. Then I import it, format as dialogue and add character names.

The takeaway here is get rid of the thing that gets in your way. Sometimes that's formatting, sometimes that's the feeling that you don't know enough about a location/subject/etc, sometimes it's being aware that what you're writing isn't your best. Get it all out of the way.

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