How to Become a Movie Writer

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Jared Drake, and I'm going to talk to you about how to become a movie writer. To become a movie writer, you first need to understand the conventions of what goes into writing a screenplay. A good place to go to understand that is film schools. Try and get into a film program. It doesn't need to be, you know, 100,000-dollar, four-year program where you'd take out, you know, a loan and an arm and a leg and you'll be in debt forever. It can be seminars on the weekends for a couple hundred bucks. It could be extension courses, whatever. Just get it...get educated by somebody that knows the conventions, that's been through the conventions that's a professional at writing screenplays and learn from them. But there's also a number of books out there that talk a lot about this. There's Robert McKee's Story -- that's a popular book in the industry with regards to screenwriting. There's Syd Field's book. There's just a ton of books on screenwriting and how you're supposed to format a script. Once you understand all of that, get yourself some screenwriting software. Final Draft is a great piece of software that's popular in the industry, as well as Movie Magic. So get one of those. That'll help you format it so you don't have to keep hitting enter, enter, enter, space, space, tab, tab, tab -- all that. That'll do all that for you so you can just write. Once you have those things, then you've just got to come up with a story. You've got to spend your time with it and you've got to write it. In my opinion, good screenplays, they always rise to the top. So if you have something that's good, it doesn't matter if you don't know anybody in the industry. Just first write a good script and then find people in the industry. All you need is one good friend. If the script is good, that friend may pass it along and that person will pass it along. But if it's a good piece of material, it'll rise to the top, so just have faith in that and take your time and write a good piece of work."