Description: Screenwriters write and develop screenplays for movies and TV shows, either by adapting pre-existing stories or based on an original idea. These screenplays are supposed to embody the emotions of the characters, the settings and the main meanings a scene is meant to portray; writers often collaborate with actors, directors and producers to achieve the best fitting screenplay which encompasses all participants’ ideas and aims. This often means a writer will draft and redraft their screenplays multiple times before deciding on the final outcome. Screenwriters can also be commissioned by producers or studios to create a certain screenplay.

What are screenwriters good at?

• Knowledge of screenwriting: understand all the key features of a screenplay and know how to improve and amend one.
• Creativity: write well and innovatively, express your ideas effectively in screenplay-form.
• Arts knowledge: a deep and wide knowledge of all genres of art, so as to be able to source ideas from a range of sources and understand cultural contexts.
• Watching film and TV drama: passion for the genre and a understanding of the industry.

Inspirational Practitioner: The Coen Brothers

The brothers usually base their screenplays on desolate and lonely, although picturesque, landscapes which often reflects personal issues each character portrays. A lot of their narratives feature the idea of luck or very unlikely situations the characters have to navigate. The Coen’s introduce the poignant landscapes as a part of the characters personalities, usually demonstrated through distinctive regional accents which are intertwined into the dialogues; for example, ‘Fargo’ features a rural dialect based on that spoken in Minnesota, said to be a combination of Scandinavian, German and Irish dialects from the 19th century. The ‘Fargo’ screenplay features this dialect heavily to implicate the toll such a rural and desolate area can have on the characters, causing a lot of their moments of anger and sadness to be intensified.