Common Screenplay Mistakes

Every screenwriter makes these mistakes early on. The most common ones are also the most fixable. They are habits picked up from novels, from misunderstanding how scripts work, or from not knowing the conventions.

Here are seven of the most frequent mistakes in spec scripts, with examples and fixes for each.

Directing on the Page

"Directing on the page" means filling your script with camera directions, shot descriptions, and editing instructions that belong in a shooting script, not a spec. This includes writing CLOSE-UP, PAN TO, TRACKING SHOT, CRANE UP, ZOOM IN, and the infamous "we see" and "the camera follows." It also includes overusing transitions like CUT TO: between every scene.

The impulse makes sense. You have a movie playing in your head and you want the reader to see exactly what you see. But a spec script is not a shot list. Your job is to make the reader feel the story. Camera directions pull the reader out of the narrative and into a production meeting.

Before:

INT. WAREHOUSE - NIGHT
THE CAMERA SLOWLY PANS across the empty warehouse floor. WE SEE broken glass everywhere. THE CAMERA TILTS UP to reveal a figure standing on the catwalk above. CLOSE-UP on the figure's boots, caked in mud. THE CAMERA PULLS BACK to a WIDE SHOT of the entire warehouse.

After:

INT. WAREHOUSE - NIGHT
Broken glass covers the concrete floor, crunching under unseen footsteps. Above, on the catwalk, a figure stands motionless. Mud-caked boots. No face visible in the dark. The warehouse stretches around them, vast and empty.

The second version creates the same visual experience without a single camera instruction. The reader sees the wide space, notices the boots, feels the emptiness.

"We see" and "we hear" are the most common offenders. Cut them ruthlessly. Instead of "We see a car pull up," write "A car pulls up." Instead of "We hear thunder in the distance," write "Thunder rumbles in the distance." The audience always sees and hears. You do not need to remind them.

Wall of Text

Open any professionally written screenplay and you will notice how much white space is on the page. Action blocks rarely exceed three or four lines. Dialogue is punchy. The page breathes. Now open a first-time screenwriter's script and you will often find dense, unbroken paragraphs of action filling half the page. This is the "wall of text" problem, and it is one of the fastest ways to lose a reader.

Script readers at agencies and production companies read hundreds of scripts. They learn to judge pace and readability at a glance. A page that is mostly dense text signals a slow, heavy read. A page with healthy white space signals a script that moves.

Before:

EXT. MARKET SQUARE - DAY
The square is packed with hundreds of people going about their daily routines. Vendors shout from their stalls, selling fish and vegetables and handmade crafts. Children weave between the legs of adults, playing some sort of chasing game. An old man sits on a bench feeding pigeons from a paper bag. Two police officers walk their beat along the eastern edge of the square, not really paying attention to anything in particular. A street musician plays an out-of-tune violin near the fountain. The fountain itself is old, cracked in places, with green moss growing on the stone. Near the north entrance, a woman in a red coat stands completely still, watching the crowd, not moving, not shopping, not talking to anyone, just standing there, and if you look closely you can see that her hands are shaking.

After:

EXT. MARKET SQUARE - DAY
Chaos. Vendors shout. Children weave through the crowd. A violinist tortures a melody near a crumbling fountain.
Near the north entrance, a WOMAN IN A RED COAT stands perfectly still. She watches the crowd. Her hands tremble at her sides.

The rewrite says less but shows more. The reader's eye now lands on what matters: the woman in the red coat. The market chaos is established in a single punchy line instead of a paragraph. Details like the pigeon man and the inattentive cops are cut because they do not serve the story.

A good rule of thumb: if an action block is more than four lines, break it up or trim it. Every line should earn its place. Ask yourself what each detail does for the scene. If the answer is "atmosphere," one line of atmosphere is plenty.

On the Nose Dialogue

On-the-nose dialogue is when characters say exactly what they feel, think, or want with no subtext, no evasion, no complexity. Real people rarely do this. They deflect, they hint, they say one thing and mean another, they avoid the topic entirely. Dialogue that ignores this reality feels flat and artificial, no matter how well it is formatted.

Before:

RACHEL
I'm really angry at you because you forgot our anniversary and it makes me feel like you don't care about our relationship anymore.
MIKE
I'm sorry. I do care about our relationship. I've just been stressed at work and I forgot. I feel terrible about it.
RACHEL
I forgive you, but I need you to try harder in the future because this relationship is important to me.

After:

INT. KITCHEN - NIGHT
Rachel washes dishes that are already clean. Mike stands in the doorway, holding a gas station bouquet still in its plastic sleeve.
MIKE
I got you these.
She doesn't turn around.
RACHEL
The vase is in the cabinet above the fridge.
Mike opens the cabinet. It's empty. The vase is on the counter, already holding dead flowers from two weeks ago.

The second version never once states how Rachel feels, yet the reader knows exactly how she feels. The already-clean dishes. The refusal to turn around. The dead flowers in the vase. Every detail communicates anger, hurt, and disappointment without anyone naming those emotions. This is subtext, and it is what separates competent dialogue from great dialogue.

The fix for on-the-nose dialogue is not to make characters cryptic or vague. It is to give them behavior. People reveal themselves through what they do, what they avoid, what they notice, and what they pretend not to notice. Let your characters act. Let the audience infer the rest.

A useful test: cover the dialogue and read only the action lines. If the scene still communicates its emotional core, your subtext is working. If the dialogue is the only thing carrying the meaning, the scene is probably too on the nose.

Passive Voice

Screenplays are written in present tense, active voice. The action is happening now, on screen, in front of the audience. When writers slip into passive voice or past tense, the script loses its immediacy and starts to feel like a novel summary rather than a living, breathing movie.

Before:

INT. BANK LOBBY - DAY
The doors were pushed open by three masked men. Guns were raised and pointed at the tellers. The customers were told to get on the floor. A silent alarm was triggered by the manager, who had been watching from his office.

After:

INT. BANK LOBBY - DAY
Three MASKED MEN kick the doors open. They raise shotguns at the tellers.
LEAD ROBBER
Floor. Now. Everyone.
Customers drop. Behind a glass partition, the MANAGER's hand slides under his desk and finds the silent alarm.

Every sentence in the rewrite has a clear subject performing an action. The men kick. They raise. The manager's hand slides. This is the language of cinema: concrete, physical, present. Passive constructions like "guns were raised" and "customers were told" distance the reader from the action, as if they are hearing about it secondhand rather than watching it unfold.

Past tense is an even more common slip. Many writers default to "She walked across the room" instead of "She walks across the room." Train yourself to write in present tense. It is the tense of screenwriting, and it makes a material difference in how the reader experiences the page.

Orphaned Sluglines

An orphaned slugline is a scene heading that appears at the very bottom of a page with no action or dialogue following it before the page break. The scene heading says INT. COURTROOM - DAY and then the page ends. The actual scene begins on the next page. This is a formatting issue rather than a writing issue, but it disrupts the reading experience and looks unprofessional.

Most professional screenwriting software handles orphan prevention automatically. If you are writing in a tool that does not, manually check each page break to ensure no scene heading sits alone at the bottom of a page. When using Ensemble, pagination is handled automatically, so orphaned sluglines are not a concern.

The same principle applies to character names. A character cue (the character's name above their dialogue) should never appear at the bottom of a page with the dialogue starting on the next page. The name and at least the first line of dialogue should stay together. Again, good screenwriting software prevents this, but it is worth knowing why it matters.

Orphans and widows (a single line of dialogue or action stranded at the top or bottom of a page) are small problems, but they accumulate. A script with clean page breaks reads more smoothly and looks more professional.

Incorrect Format

Screenplay format exists so anyone in the industry can pick up a script and immediately know what they are looking at. Margins, spacing, capitalization, and element placement are standardized. When format is wrong, it creates friction and signals the writer has not done their homework.

The most common formatting mistakes include:

Incorrect scene headings. Writing "Scene: Inside the bank" instead of "INT. BANK - DAY." Scene headings follow a strict pattern: INT. or EXT. (or INT./EXT.), location, and time of day, separated by dashes, all in uppercase.
Missing character cues. Starting dialogue without indicating who is speaking. The character name must always appear above the dialogue, centered and in uppercase.
Wrong margins. Action runs to the wrong margins. Dialogue is too wide or too narrow. Character cues are left-aligned instead of centered. These details matter because the one-page- per-minute rule depends on consistent formatting.
Bold, italic, or underlined text. Spec scripts generally use none of these. Scene headings are uppercase but not bold. Emphasis in action lines comes from word choice, not formatting. Some writers underline scene headings, which is acceptable but not necessary.
Numbering scenes. Scene numbers are added during pre-production for the shooting script. They do not belong in a spec script.

Before:

Scene 14 - Inside the hospital, it's daytime
Dr. Wilson is walking toward the patient room. She is carrying a clipboard. She looks worried.
Dr. Wilson: "We need to talk about your results."

After:

INT. HOSPITAL CORRIDOR - DAY
DR. WILSON strides toward a patient room, clipboard tight against her chest.
DR. WILSON
We need to talk about your results.

Using a dedicated screenplay editor like Ensemble eliminates most formatting mistakes automatically. The software enforces correct margins, element placement, and page breaks so you can focus on writing.

Overwriting

Overwriting covers all the ways a screenplay can say too much: purple prose in action lines, dialogue that runs too long, describing a character's thoughts and feelings that the camera cannot see, explaining what a scene "means," and including details irrelevant to the story.

Every word should serve story, character, or tone. When a script is overwritten, the real story gets buried under excess.

Before:

EXT. CEMETERY - MORNING
The cemetery is old and sprawling, with weathered gravestones that date back hundreds of years. Some of the stones are so worn that the names are no longer legible. Morning dew clings to the grass, and a gentle mist hangs in the air, giving everything a dreamlike quality. Birds sing in the old oak trees that line the gravel path. GRACE, a woman in her late 30s who has been through more than anyone should have to endure, walks slowly along the path. She thinks about her mother, who died when Grace was just a child, and about all the years she spent blaming herself for something that was never her fault. She stops at a grave and kneels. She wishes she could go back in time and say all the things she never got to say.

After:

EXT. CEMETERY - MORNING
Mist. Old stones. Names worn smooth by time.
GRACE (30s) kneels at a grave. She opens her mouth to speak, but nothing comes. She tries again. Nothing.
She places a single flower on the stone and walks away.

The rewrite is a fraction of the length but more powerful. It does not tell us Grace thinks about her mother or blames herself. It shows a woman who cannot find words at a graveside. The reader fills in the rest, which is exactly what cinema does. The audience brings their own emotional experience to the image.

One of the most common forms of overwriting is describing what characters think or feel internally. "She thinks about her childhood" is unfilmable. The camera cannot see thoughts. Translate internal states into external behavior: a clenched jaw, a turned back, a glass set down too hard. If the audience needs to know what a character is thinking, the character should do something that reveals it.

Another form is the irrelevant detail. The hundred-year-old gravestones, the birds in the oak trees, the gravel path. Unless these details pay off later in the story (the character hides something behind a gravestone, the birds go silent before a threat appears), they are decoration. A screenplay is not a novel. You do not need to build a complete sensory world in prose. You need to give the reader enough to see the scene and feel the moment.

After finishing a draft, go through every action block and ask two questions. First: can the camera see this? If not, cut it or translate it into behavior. Second: does this detail matter to the story? If not, cut it. A lean script is almost always a better script.

None of these mistakes are fatal. Every professional screenwriter has made all of them. The difference is the willingness to recognize and fix them. Read your scripts with a critical eye. Read produced screenplays to calibrate your instincts. In screenwriting, less is almost always more.

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