Be Visual

As Alfred Hitchcock puts it:

“A lot of writers think they’re filling the page with words, but they’re
filling the screen with images.”
It may seem obvious, but it’s the key thing to remember in
scriptwriting: you’re writing prospectively. The stack of pages you have
when you’re done is not the finished product.

This has some pretty big implications for the act of scriptwriting itself,
perhaps the most obvious being that whatever is on the page actually needs to
translate audio-visually.

There’s always a temptation to let scriptwriting slide into a more novelistic

style, whereby characters’ thoughts and backstories are mentioned offhand in
description.

And, to be fair, there isn’t a blanket ban on that.

Screenwriters like Shane Black and Paul Schrader like to use little omniscient
details to enhance the readers experience of the script. A script is, after all,
always read before it’s seen.

But there’s a fine line to walk here. Telling us in description that

your protagonist has a dark past and doesn’t suffer fools gladly isn’t enough.
In fact it’s dead text if that past doesn’t come back to haunt them and there
aren’t actual fools to not suffer.

The next trap is to respond by placing that information in dialogue, and this is
where we come to the most ubiquitous of screenwriting mantras:
Show, don’t tell.