Your script should be therapy, you wouldn’t write if you had a better way to externalize the issues that snag and hold and fascinate you. Using language to communicate your deepest self to others is your thing.

Except you have to be really careful when you choose screenwriting to do this, because your first job is not to talk it out amongst your characters, that’s a playwright’s job, which you will notice is often a problem when a film is based on a play.

Your screenplay needs a hook to explore the issue, which can be classed as the protagonist’s active pursuit of a specific tangible goal. That’s the story.

The therapy works in the background, not the foreground. When your logline sounds like the answer to “So, tell me about your mother…” you haven’t developed your hook far enough.

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