People like films for different reasons. Given my involvement in screenwriting, it’s no great surprise that I’m a big fan of the story as the central element of film. But others will like a film because of who’s in it. Casting is a sufficiently powerful aspect of film that one of the few factors that will lead to a movie’s success is the presence of star performers. Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino owe much of their success to the entertainment value of their dialogue. And where would David Lean be without majestic landscapes to capture on celluloid?

Given these various factors which contribute to the total experience of a movie, make sure you give each of them some breathing room in your screenplays. I’m writing a script at the moment which depends in part for its effectiveness on my ability to suggest a link between a hospital and one of its patients, at least in his mind. The hospital location is an important part of the film, and as the protagonist goes from being ill to getting well that needs to come across in how the setting appears on screen. But to convince whoever the director is that it’s the right route to take, I first need to capture that elusive connection on the page.

Think about how some of your favourite films have created their magic, and work out how you can use words that will result in special cinematic moments in your films. It all starts with the screenplay. I’ve always been taken by the amazing staging of characters in Kurosawa films: groups of samurai or villagers in his historical films are inevitably choreographed in ways that communicate much about their character, status, and relationships. What would I need to do to be able to write such a scene, rather than just doing the bare minimum of ‘a group of villagers come out of a tavern, led by a wily elder’?

It’s considering these elements that will raise your screenplay above the generic and take it into a league of its own. Sure, you’ll be influenced by those who’ve come before you. But learn well, and learn from those aspects of films that speak to you that others seem not to be able to reproduce. What’s to stop you coming up with solutions that would normally be in a director’s domain? If they like what you’ve written, all the more chance they’ll go with your script. If not, at least you made the effort to use words to create an experience, and not just another chunk of description.

I was really taken by the effect used in the Christmas Dr Who story to turn humans into copies of the Master. It was simple, but effective, and may well have been influenced by a similar effect in Jacob’s Ladder. It’s all to do with moving the head so fast that it blurs. Think about how you’d like your effects to appear on screen: it’s your job to inspire a director and a bunch of specialist animators, model makers etc to come up with something special. And it starts with letters, that become words, that become sentences. Don’t just assume that the FX work will be someone else’s job: you’re the custodian of this story, and it’s up to you to get across to people reading it just how things look, sound, and even smell.

None of this detracts from the brilliance of David Mamet’s suggestions in On Directing Film: you still have to create a story in discrete beats, a sequence of A, then B, then C giving the viewer exactly the information you want them to have at that point, that gives you precise insight into how they’re thinking and feeling. Those building blocks will always be one of your primary tools as a screenwriter. But you also need to think wider. Consider the finished film in the very best version of it you can conceive of, and work out how to capture its impact in the words you write.