Screenwriting uses a lot of very specific terminology: inciting incident, lock-in, obligatory scene, and planting & payoff... to name a few. But when it comes to the five major plot points, writers often have a hard time understanding and establishing the difference between the first culmination and the main culmination. The First Culmination is your midpoint, and the best way to set it up is by KNOWING YOUR ENDING. To know your ending is crucial to the structural blueprint of your script because A LOT of decisions are determined in direct response from the ending.…

The “I” Page: There’s nothing worse than a plethora of “I” pages, that is, pages that are top to bottom dialogue. When this happens, the page literally looks like an “I” because dialogue is margined to fill a narrower column. This creates a lot of white space on the right and left of the page, but it also screams amateur. A screenplay is a visual story, not just a stage play. If you want to write characters that talk, talk, talk their way through a scene, you should be writing for the stage, not the movies.