Screenplay Formatting Basics

The six elements

SCENE HEADING (or slugline): INT. or EXT., the location, and the time of day — INT. COFFEE SHOP - DAY. It's a camera-and-crew instruction, in caps. ACTION: present-tense description of what we see and hear. Lean and vertical — white space is pacing. CHARACTER CUE: the speaker's name, capitalized, above their line.

DIALOGUE: the spoken words, in a narrower column under the cue. PARENTHETICAL: a brief (wry) delivery note between cue and dialogue — used sparingly; actors notice. TRANSITION: editing instructions like CUT TO:, right-aligned — mostly unnecessary in a spec, since a new scene heading already implies the cut.

The rules that actually matter

Twelve-point Courier, roughly one-inch margins, dialogue in its narrower column — these produce the one-page-a-minute math that everyone budgets against. A spec feature lands between 90 and 120 pages; drift far outside that and the page count itself becomes a note.

Write only what the camera can see or the audience can hear. Interior monologue, backstory, and novelistic texture belong in prose; on a screenplay page they're dead weight. When a character speaks over a scene break, the (CONT'D) after their cue tells the actor the speech continues — good software handles that for you.

Let the tool hold the ruler

Nobody formats by hand anymore. A screenwriting editor keeps elements typed and aligned as you write — Tab and Enter move you between them — so the craft decisions stay yours and the margins stay the software's problem. Import and export in the formats the industry trades in (PDF, Final Draft, Fountain) and the document survives every hop.

Terms used in this guide