If you’ve never formatted a screenplay before, the rules can feel arbitrary — why does dialogue sit in the middle of the page? Why is everything in Courier? The truth is that every rule exists for a practical reason: a correctly formatted script reads at roughly one page per minute of screen time, and it lets a director, actor or cinematographer find what they need at a glance. Once you know the five or six recurring building blocks, the rest is muscle memory.
The font and page rules
Standard format uses 12-point Courier (or the near-identical Courier Prime), on an 8.5″ by 11″ page, with a 1.5″ left margin, and roughly 1″ on the top, right and bottom. This isn’t an aesthetic choice: monospaced Courier at this size and margin produces the industry’s rule of thumb that one page equals about one minute of screen time.
Scene headings (sluglines)
Every new scene opens with a scene heading in capital letters, telling the reader three things at once: whether the scene is interior or exterior, where it is, and roughly when.
INT. COFFEE SHOP – DAY
INT. or EXT. comes first, followed by the location, then a dash and the time of day (usually DAY or NIGHT). Keep it short and specific — it’s a label, not a description.
Action lines
Action (sometimes called description) is written in the present tense, left-aligned, and should only describe what can be seen or heard on screen — never a character’s internal thoughts. Keep paragraphs short; dense blocks of action are hard to read quickly, and screenplays are read quickly, often more than once by the same person.
Character cues
Before any line of dialogue, the speaking character’s name appears in capital letters, roughly centered above their line.
MAYA
The first time a character appears, introduce them briefly in an action line (age range and one distinguishing detail is usually enough) before they start speaking.
Dialogue
Dialogue sits in an indented block beneath the character cue, narrower than the full page width. Write the way people actually talk — screenplay dialogue is almost always shorter and choppier than prose dialogue, because it has to survive being spoken out loud by an actor.
Parentheticals
A short instruction in parentheses, placed between the character cue and the dialogue, indicates tone or a brief physical action — for example (quietly) or (to herself). Use these sparingly. A parenthetical on every line is usually a sign the dialogue itself isn’t doing enough work.
Transitions
Right-aligned instructions like CUT TO: or FADE OUT. mark a transition between scenes. Modern spec scripts use these far less often than they used to — most scene changes don’t need one at all, since a new scene heading already implies a cut.
Common beginner mistakes
- Writing camera directions. Spec scripts generally avoid
CLOSE ON,PAN TOand similar directing notes — that’s the director’s job. - Overwriting action lines. If it can’t be filmed, it doesn’t belong in an action line — that includes backstory, internal feelings, and metaphor-heavy prose.
- Inconsistent character names. Once you introduce “MAYA”, don’t switch to “Maya Chen” or “THE WOMAN” later in the same script.
- Manual formatting. Fighting tab stops and margins in a general word processor is where most beginners lose momentum. A tool built specifically for screenplay format — like Minimalist Screenwriter — handles all of this automatically as you type.
The fastest way to learn the format
Reading produced scripts helps, but nothing teaches format faster than writing in it. A dedicated screenwriting tool applies these rules for you — correct margins, automatic capitalization, the right indent for dialogue — so you absorb the shape of a script simply by using it, without first mastering a style guide.
