How to Write a Screenplay Outline (With a Template and Example)

What a screenplay outline is and why you write one

A screenplay outline is the film in list form. Every scene, in order, with enough detail that you know what happens, who wants what, and what changes. Nobody outside the writers' room reads it. Its whole purpose is to let you make the expensive decisions, what the ending is, where the midpoint falls, which scenes exist, before you have written 100 pages that depend on them.

The alternative is discovery drafting, and for most writers it fails at the same place. The first act is easy because setup writes itself. Around page 30 the setup is spent, the ending is far away, and every scene becomes a structural decision as well as a scene. That is the stall. An outline removes it because the structural decisions have already been made, and the only job left is to write the scene well. The full drafting process, of which this is step three, is in how to write a screenplay.

An outline is not a treatment. A treatment is prose written for a buyer; an outline is a list written for you. If you need the distinction, read what is a treatment.

Beat outline vs scene list vs step outline

Three documents get called an outline, and they are usually built in this order, each one expanding the last.

The beat outline is the skeleton and is covered in what is a beat sheet. The step outline is the version many working writers actually use, because a step is a unit of story rather than a unit of location: "Nell discovers the boat is gone" is one step even if it plays across the dock, the shed and the kitchen. The scene list is what you draft from, because each entry becomes a scene heading.

Whichever level you work at, each entry answers the same three questions: who wants what in this scene, what stands in the way, and what is different at the end. An entry that cannot answer the third question describes a scene you will cut later. Cut it now.

The index card method

Index cards have survived every generation of software because they solve the problem outlines have: you cannot see a list all at once, but you can see a wall. One card per scene. On the front, the scene heading and one line of what happens. In a corner, the act or sequence number. On the back, if you like, what the scene is secretly about.

Lay the cards out in rows, one row per act or per sequence. Gaps show immediately: a first act with eighteen cards and a third act with six is a script that will run long and end abruptly. Colour the B story and the antagonist's scenes differently and you can see whether a subplot disappears for thirty pages.

Cards also make reordering free. Swapping two scenes in a document means cutting, pasting and fixing what breaks; on a wall it means moving two cards and staring at the result. The free index card scene board gives you the same drag-and-reorder wall in a browser, and Zen Writer's scene navigator carries the idea into the draft itself: every scene heading becomes a card with a synopsis you can drag to reorder, so the outline and the script stay one document.

The sequence approach: eight sequences of 12 to 15 pages

The sequence method, taught at USC and set out in Paul Gulino's Screenwriting: The Sequence Approach, treats a feature as eight short films of 12 to 15 pages each, every one with its own tension, escalation and resolution that opens the next. It maps directly onto three acts, two sequences in act one, four in act two, two in act three, and it fixes the second-act sag by giving pages 30 to 85 four separate mini-goals instead of one long slog.

Outline by sequence and you never plan more than 15 pages at a time. Each sequence gets a one-line question the audience is asking ("Will Nell get the lamp lit before dark?"), and the sequence ends when that question is answered, usually in a way that raises a worse one. The page ranges above are proportions; scale them to your target length with the free beat sheet calculator. How the sequences sit inside the acts is explained in three-act structure for screenplays.

Screenplay outline example: an excerpt

Here is a scene-list excerpt from an invented thriller, The Last Lamp, covering the end of sequence two and the start of sequence three. Each entry carries a number, a heading, one line of event and one line of change.

SEQUENCE 2 — Will Nell take the relief keeper's job? (pp. 12–25)

14. INT. HARBOUR OFFICE - DAY
    Nell is offered the lighthouse post nobody wants. Learns the last
    keeper walked into the sea.
    Change: she has a way out of the town, and a reason to be afraid of it.

15. EXT. NELL'S MOTHER'S HOUSE - DUSK
    Nell tells her mother she is leaving. Mother: "Your brother
    went out there too."
    Change: we learn Cal is alive and Nell has been lying about it.

16. INT. FERRY - NIGHT
    Nell crosses in a storm, the only passenger. The ferryman will
    not say Cal's name.
    Change: point of no return. FIRST PLOT POINT.

SEQUENCE 3 — Can Nell run the light alone? (pp. 25–40)

17. INT. LIGHTHOUSE - CONTINUOUS
    Nell finds the log. The last entry is in Cal's handwriting.
    Change: the job is now a search.

Notice how little is here. No dialogue beyond one line, no description, no theme. An outline that reads like a script is a script with the formatting removed. Keep the entries lean so you can hold forty of them in your head at once.

The line beginning "Change" is the one that matters. If two consecutive entries have the same change, one of them is redundant. If an entry's change does not cause the next entry, the story has a gap you have not noticed yet, and it is cheaper to find it here than on page 60.

How long should a screenplay outline be?

As long as it needs to be to stop you stalling, and no longer. Concrete numbers for a 110-page feature:

• Beat outline: 10 to 15 entries, one to two pages.
• Scene list: 40 to 70 entries, four to eight pages. Fewer than 40 scenes usually means scenes are running long; more than 80 usually means the film is running long.
• Per scene: one to three lines. If an entry passes five lines you are drafting, not outlining.

A useful check: a feature scene averages about two pages, so 55 scenes is a 110-page script. If your list has 90 entries, you are outlining a 150-page film and should cut before drafting, not after. The relationship between scene count and page count, and what page count is acceptable, is in how many pages should a screenplay be.

Television outlines run differently. A network hour outline is often 8 to 12 pages and is a formal deliverable the network approves before the script is written.

From outline to first draft

Once the scene list is fixed, drafting becomes a mechanical act of filling in cards, which is the point. Three habits make the transition clean.

1. Carry the outline into the script. Enter every scene heading first, with the outline line beneath it as a placeholder, before you write a word of the scene. In Zen Writer, each heading appears in the scene navigator and the placeholder can live in the scene synopsis, so the outline becomes the document's spine and you can jump to any scene.
2. Write scenes out of order if you want. With the whole shape fixed you can draft the climax first and the difficult dinner scene last.
3. Let the draft disobey the outline. When a scene wants to go somewhere the card did not predict, follow it, then go back to the wall and see what it breaks downstream. The outline is a map, not a contract.

Set a daily page goal before you start, three pages a day is the working standard, and a 55-scene outline becomes a draft in five or six weeks. Writing each scene well is its own craft, covered in how to write a scene. If you want to move straight from cards to pages without switching apps, download Zen Writer free on iPhone, iPad, Mac or Android and draft with the navigator open beside the page. The rest of the screenwriting guides pick up from here.

Common screenplay outline mistakes

1. Outlining without an ending. Write the last card first. Everything else exists to earn it.
2. Scenes without change. "They talk about the plan" is not a scene. "She agrees to the plan she swore she would refuse" is.
3. A first act that is half the cards. Setup is easy to invent and dull to watch. Act one is 25 pages, about twelve scenes.
4. A lost subplot. Colour the B story on the wall. If the colour vanishes for two rows, the subplot is broken.
5. Over-writing entries. Paragraphs of prose per scene produce a 30-page outline that is harder to hold than the script.
6. Treating the outline as finished. Rewrite the outline after the first draft, from the pages, and compare. The gap between the two is your rewrite plan.

Frequently asked questions

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