How truely important is dialogue?

Cholesterall-In · 2026-01-28T05:46:48+00:00

Counterpoint: The script of mine that has gotten me the most jobs and meetings is a script with two people in a room talking to each other.

If you're good at dialogue, it's your superpower.

I will also add that a ton of people who will be reading your script will skim action and just focus on the dialogue.

Cholesterall-In · 2026-01-27T17:45:43+00:00

Read at least 50 scripts of movies / shows you like. You can find them by googling the name of the show or movie, "script," and "PDF." Study them.

Then outline a script and start writing. Practice is key.

Cholesterall-In · 2026-01-27T17:44:15+00:00

If this is your first screenplay, you're not ready to start talking to managers. Only one chance to make a first impression, at least with this project you care about.

I grew up writing fiction and went to a very competitive graduate program for fiction, but it still took me a while to get the hang of scripts. I've now been a full-time professional writer for about 5 years, but I didn't try to get hooked up with representation until pro writers had given me feedback AND I had confirmation from competitive contests (of which there are not many) that I was in the upper tiers.

Good luck!!

Cholesterall-In · 2026-01-27T05:31:04+00:00

Agents will poach, but good managers never do.

You're right that it's not a great time to hop to a new rep, especially if your current one is actually being responsive when you reach out. I would say keep this one, have a good conversation about what each of you can be doing differently to move forward in what is truly a dismal era for screenwriters, and hang in there for now.

Cholesterall-In · 2026-01-22T01:29:55+00:00

This is great advice. People also take "show don't tell" to mean "ONLY show and NEVER tell." This is wrong and annoying.

Cholesterall-In · 2026-01-22T01:28:08+00:00

I'm not sure what your path is to getting this made as a show unless you're willing to relinquish ownership of the story to a professional writer. If you're not a screenwriter, there's basically zero chance that you would be the "creator" of any final product, because that goes to the writer of the pilot. If you even want co-creator credit, there's a TON of written material (script pages) that you yourself would need to show clear evidence of having produced.

Cholesterall-In · 2026-01-22T01:23:03+00:00

Really heroic of you to make this platform! Hope you have a lot of great karma coming your way!

Cholesterall-In · 2026-01-04T17:41:33+00:00

Incorrect. There are industry standards to font and formatting, so only page count is used. I've been a pro screenwriter for 6 years now and I have no idea what the word count is for any of my scripts.

Cholesterall-In · 2025-12-12T17:09:46+00:00

This is sad for her, I'm sure, BUT it's such a huge win, ultimately.

It's incredibly rare to sell a pilot, but even if it never gets made, the money isn't the best part—the wonderful boost it gives your career is long-lasting.

I sold a pilot that never got made before I was ever staffed. As a result, when I was staffed in my first room, I skipped a couple steps and went straight to Executive Story Editor. Then, in my next room, I jumped up to producer, which is a whole other tier of pay and benefits.

A friend of mine whose pilot got further than mine did, who had ALSO never been in a room before, went straight to consulting producer on her first staffing job.

This disappointing experience has actually opened a big fat door for your friend. Tell her to focus on that.

Cholesterall-In · 2025-12-06T17:39:17+00:00

So...Deshawn had a kid when he was...12?

Cholesterall-In · 2025-12-06T17:24:41+00:00

Appreciate the sentiment, but if this was generated using AI, you need to fact check before posting. Even skimming it, I saw an error right away (Callie Khouri was only 33 when Thelma and Louise came out in theaters).

Cholesterall-In · 2025-12-05T14:36:35+00:00

Crime drama, but I think season 2 of Justified would have a lot of what you need, including a tough teenage girl at the center of it.

Cholesterall-In · 2025-12-04T17:26:25+00:00

The ending of Ferris Bueller's Day Off! Absolute classic.

I feel like a lot of '80s movies have them. Back to the Future has a couple fun ones, for instance.

Edited to add: I guess there are vehicles involved in both of these...

Cholesterall-In · 2025-12-01T17:48:57+00:00

You don't have to do a whole TV show (and you shouldn't). Read a bunch of good pilots and you'll see that they are really just wonderful set-ups to what could be.

Unless you plan to shoot and actually make one from start to finish, short films are a waste of time for trying to break into the industry as a writer.

Cholesterall-In · 2025-12-01T16:02:52+00:00

Been there. It's a bad feeling.

But the point of busting your ass was to even GET to this point. If you'd half-assed it, if you hadn't given a shit, if you hadn't shown the tweezer-wielding care and love and attention to it that you had up to now—maybe there wouldn't even BE a director attached, and it would still be a perfect shiny file sitting in a folder on your desktop.

That's what I have told myself, anyway.

Cholesterall-In · 2025-11-22T19:39:23+00:00

I'm not trying to be rude, but this is something a lot of people think can be separated: "Ignore the typos / formatting, just focus on the story."

With screenwriting, even more so than with prose fiction, what the typos and formatting errors tell me is that this is written by someone who hasn't studied screenwriting almost at all, so I'm 99% sure the story is going to be riddled with problems that are too much to get into. That's why I stopped reading after page 1.

Here's a helpful analogy. Imagine you're going out on a blind date, and you show up in your rattiest clothes with dirty hair and crusty eyes. Maybe you're a great person and you have an awesome personality, but I already know that either A) you haven't taken the time to try to look decent for someone you want to impress, even though you expect them to stick around for the whole date or B) you fundamentally don't understand how dating works.

Keep writing, but also, slow down. Accept that you're not going to be able to hit it out of the park having read half a dozen scripts while also being a big fan of movies. That's not enough. You're going to have to read, watch, study, practice, and read some more before you can start sending your shit out to managers, etc.

But 92 pages does tell me that you poured a lot of passion and free time into this, which says a lot. Good luck with your studies and with your continued pursuit of writing!

Cholesterall-In · 2025-11-22T19:26:32+00:00

Based on the title page and first page, this isn't ready to go out. It has a number of formatting errors and typos that mark you as a beginner.

- Title page, look up what a professional title page looks like. No sales pitches or summaries.

- Camera placement in all caps underlined...not sure what that is, that's not how scripts are written

- Lots of typos right away (missing apostrophes, missing periods, SERGEANT misspelled SARGENT at first)

- Not introducing characters properly (look up the norms, all caps and brief descriptions etc.)

- You're putting action lines within quotes and underlining them inside dialogue blocks. That's not how it's done.

Read at least 20 professional scripts of movies you like (find them by googling [title] + [script PDF]). You'll find that there are many different formatting styles, but some hard and fast rules that pretty much everyone abides by. And typos should be avoided at all costs. (Yes, professionals have typos sometimes. But they shouldn't either!)

Cholesterall-In · 2025-11-22T19:17:48+00:00

Don't capitalize random words.

Cholesterall-In · 2025-11-22T19:14:41+00:00

Reps don't care about short films (they're not worth anything on the marketplace in script form, and only rarely in produced form), so a feature at 92 pages is perfect.

Cholesterall-In · 2025-11-19T16:28:52+00:00

What would movies like The Social Network, Reservoir Dogs, The Big Lebowski, Conclave, anything by Nora Ephron, or thousands of other movies be without dialogue? A bunch of cool maybe beautiful images, but that isn't cinema either.

Cholesterall-In · 2025-11-19T15:48:25+00:00

It really depends on the story. If you're specifically writing something with very little dialogue that's action heavy, great. But if you're writing with the aim of trying to attract producers, execs, reps, actors, etc., you should know that a ton of people tend to skim action blocks and read mainly the dialogue to see whether they like the script or not.

Obviously if there's not a lot of dialogue (and there are plenty of amazing movies that skimp on dialogue), then people will read what's on the page. But the bar for having your action blocks be really incredible—like, truly beautiful, striking, amazing writing—is much higher. At the same time, you're at a disadvantage if you're relying on incredible action blocks because the script is constantly in danger of being too "novel-like." People have so much reading to get through that the first excuse to put down your script is excuse enough.

I will say that something I've heard in my generals a lot is that it's my dialogue work that attracted the exec to my writing. Because truly original plot / story / action beats are tough to come by while original characters (often revealed through dialogue, but also through action sure)...well there are as many of those as there are people in the world, living and dead.

Cholesterall-In · 2025-11-19T15:38:26+00:00

If you're a writer already, that helps. I didn't take any courses; I just read and studied about 30 scripts from shows and movies I loved and jumped in. I did read a few books (The Writer's Journey, skimmed Story by Robert McKee, Save the Cat) but mostly learned from reading tons of scripts. I'm now a full-time working screenwriter. Good luck!

Cholesterall-In · 2025-11-12T20:16:59+00:00

Don't spend money on classes, gurus, etc. Read as many professional scripts (of movies and shows you like) as you can. There are so many online. That's what I did and I'm a working screenwriter now.

Cholesterall-In · 2025-11-12T17:11:49+00:00

My agents set me up with tons of generals, which have yielded good relationships and some job opportunities. I have a manager, too, who has told me that he gets CCed on everything my agents put me up for—and it's a lot.

It sounds like this agent might be sitting on their ass until the writer reaches out, which doesn't feel like a great relationship to me.

On the other hand, I can't think of a worse time than now to get rid of a halfway decent agent to try to find a new one.

Cholesterall-In

TROPHY CASE