Incorporating Environment into Your Screenplay

(and Level Up)

If you’ve been following my substack for a minute or so, you probably already know that I host a monthly online writers group and that some of the topics I choose to write about here are topics that come up in that group. In our last meeting, I gave a note to one of the members that I felt she needed to better utilize the environment in her screenplay and one of the other members wanted me to elaborate on that, so I figured it was worth a post since some of you may be wondering what that note meant as well.

Let’s start by examining what a screenplay is. It’s essentially the blueprint for what will eventually become, as the U.S. Copyright Office puts it, a ‘work of the visual arts.’ While a screenplay does need to retain some literary integrity—I’m an advocate of infusing personal writing style into your screenplay in the same way you would if you were writing a novel—very few people are going to read it. Mostly just the cast, crew, producers, distributors (possibly) and the agents or r…