Screenwriting
The Blueprint for Visual Storytelling
From the earliest silent films to today’s streaming series, screenwriting has shaped the way we see and imagine stories. It is a craft that lives at the intersection of words and images, where dialogue, description, and structure work together to conjure entire worlds on screen.
Unlike prose, screenwriting is not an end in itself but a beginning — a blueprint that guides directors, actors, and production teams in transforming text into sight and sound. Every scene written on the page becomes the seed for collaboration, interpretation, and ultimately, a shared experience in front of an audience.
In the present, screenwriting spans genres and platforms: film, television, web series, even interactive and immersive media. As technology and storytelling forms continue to evolve, the script remains the heartbeat of visual storytelling — adapting, but never losing its central role.
This section celebrates that evolving craft. Here you’ll find explorations of screenwriting’s history, techniques, and possibilities — encouragement for both new writers finding their voice and experienced creators refining their vision.
Architecture of Implication
By analyzing the origins, rules, and creative circumventions of the Motion Picture Production Code, this article demonstrates how Hollywood’s era of self-censorship inadvertently created a new cinematic grammar. It explores how screenwriters used subtext, symbolism, and omission to navigate constraints, leaving a complex legacy on American film.
Cognitive Carnage
This article analyzes the ‘Red Wedding,’ arguing its impact stems from inducing a catastrophic ‘prediction error’ in the viewer’s brain. Synthesizing cognitive science (predictive processing, theory of mind) and cultural theory, it explains how the episode dismantled audience trust, creating a lasting tension in the television landscape between cynical realism and radical sincerity.
Genre as Barometer
This article traces the evolution of the American crime genre as a barometer for the erosion of institutional trust. Through the screenwriting of W.R. Burnett, Robert Towne, and Paul Schrader, the genre maps the collapse of key ‘shared fictions’: the belief in a just system, a benevolent state, and a coherent self. Citations have been revised and verified for accuracy.
Genres as Narrative Algorithms
This article argues that film genres like screwball comedy and film noir function as ’narrative algorithms’—repeatable cultural procedures that process socio-economic anxiety (e.g., the Great Depression, post-war paranoia) and produce cognitive maps for audiences, transforming social contradictions into structured narrative outcomes. Citations have been revised and verified for accuracy.
Literary Single Take
This article proposes a framework of ‘functional analogy’ to connect the cinematic single take with literary techniques like stream of consciousness, the continuous outline, and the one-sentence novel. Drawing on film theory from Bazin and Mulvey and narratology from Ryan, it examines how literature simulates the temporal pressure and unfiltered intimacy of an unbroken shot.
Narrative Singularity
Moving beyond subjective praise of ‘greatest episodes,’ this article introduces the Narrative Singularity—an analytical framework for identifying the pivotal, irreversible moments that redefine a TV show’s trajectory. Using Breaking Bad’s ‘Ozymandias’ as a case study and Game of Thrones’ ‘The Bells’ as a counter-example, it defines the properties of these system-altering events and provides a new tool for cultural criticism.
Poe and Psychological Architecture
This article defines and theorizes the concept of ‘Psychological Architecture’ through Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ situating it in conversation with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Gaston Bachelard, Anthony Vidler, and Fred Botting. It then traces the persistence of Gothic spatial logics in contemporary television—most notably Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House and the political series House of Cards—to argue for a broader understanding of space as a narratively constitutive force.
Screenwriters as New Novelists
This article explores the evolution of the screenwriter, arguing that in the current golden age of television (Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad), the showrunner has emerged as a ’new novelist.’ Through an examination of the writer’s room, deep character development, and novelistic narrative structures, it posits that the modern television series has become a dominant literary form.
The Ambiguity Machine
This article reframes Henry James’s classic ghost story not as a literary puzzle, but as the blueprint for a powerful narrative technology: The Ambiguity Engine. By synthesizing literary criticism with cognitive psychology, it argues that the story’s engineered uncertainty is what makes it so potent and endlessly adaptable, turning the reader into a co-creator of the horror.
The Bridgerton Effect
This article argues that Bridgerton’s record-breaking success stems from its strategic blend of historical fantasy with contemporary sensibilities, using color-conscious casting, anachronistic aesthetics, and a feminist-inflected narrative to legitimize the romance genre for a mass audience.
The Constant Principle
This article deconstructs the Lost episode ‘The Constant’ to define ‘The Constant Principle’—a narrative technique that solves science fiction’s core challenge of balancing intellectual complexity with emotional resonance. By analysing its structure and synthesizing it with principles of cognitive psychology and narrative theory, we frame the episode not as a classic, but as a repeatable blueprint for powerful storytelling.
The Evolving Blueprint
This article analyzes the evolution of screenwriting through four distinct eras: the studio-controlled Golden Age, the auteur-driven New Hollywood, the high-concept blockbuster period, and the decentralized streaming landscape. It argues that changes in the screenwriter’s role and the script’s form are driven by underlying shifts in technology, economics, and cultural power.
The Evolving Blueprint of Screenwriting
This article reframes screenwriting ‘rules’ not as static conventions but as an evolving cognitive blueprint. It argues that narrative patterns like the three-act structure are successful because they mirror how our brains process information, making them a powerful, double-edged toolkit for storytellers.
The Industrial Logic of Déjà Vu
This article argues that narrative repetition in television procedurals is not a creative failure but a systemic feature of industrial media production. Synthesizing genre theory and media economics, it demonstrates how standardized formulas function as risk-mitigation strategies and efficient production templates within the ‘culture industry.’
The Laminated Model of Dialogue
This article moves beyond synthesis to propose a new ‘Laminated Model’ of screenplay dialogue. It argues dialogue is a cognitive technology composed of three dynamic layers: the Performative (Goffman), the Cognitive (Zunshine), and the Mythic (Harari). This model resolves the paradox between dialogue as plot weapon and social simulator, suggesting a film’s quality is linked to the complexity of the cognitive tasks its dialogue assigns.
The Lupin Gambit
This article argues that the Netflix adaptation’s success stems from its deliberate evolution of Arsène Lupin from a playful insider who affirmed the wit of the French establishment into a post-colonial folk hero who uses the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house.
The Red Room's Long Shadow
This article argues that the Twin Peaks finale was a deliberate act of Cognitive Disruption. By synthesizing narrative theory and cognitive psychology, it reframes the episode as a moment of Narrative Inversion that swapped plot resolution for a potent, psychoanalytic conclusion, changing television’s DNA.
The Screenwriter as Myth-Maker
This article argues that the screenwriter’s changing role—from studio system artisan to auteur to showrunner—is an index of a deeper structural transformation in how industrial societies produce their myths. This evolution now culminates in a data-driven ’new studio system’ where algorithms shape narrative production.
The Trojan Horse of Laughter
Moving beyond genre history, this article analyzes how three key screenwriters—Ben Hecht, Preston Sturges, and Billy Wilder—weaponized the conventions of screwball comedy. It connects their work to the underlying economic and social crises of their time: the Great Depression’s cynicism, the absurdity of the WWII-era class system, and the oppressive conformity of the Cold War.
The Twilight Zone: Moral Imagination
By analyzing two seminal episodes of The Twilight Zone in dialogue with Rod Serling’s own commentary and the modern legacy of Black Mirror, this essay demonstrates how midcentury television developed a unique architecture of moral inquiry under the pressures of censorship, fear, and form. It situates Serling’s work as the origin point of ‘Television as Thought Experiment’—a narrative mode still defining speculative media.
The Unspoken Engine
This article uses frameworks from Erving Goffman, Lisa Zunshine, and Yuval Noah Harari to analyse screenplay dialogue as a cognitive technology. It argues that dialogue is a simulation that leverages subtext, Theory of Mind, metarepresentation, and levels of intentionality to construct a story’s world, with examples from The Godfather, Succession, and Star Wars.
The Usher Contagion
This article reframes Edgar Allan Poe’s classic story ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ not as a static piece of literature, but as an evolutionary narrative archetype that diagnoses a timeless affliction: Generational Decay. It analyses how the story’s core themes resonate with modern anxieties about generational trauma and corporate greed, particularly through the lens of Mike Flanagan’s Netflix adaptation and real-world archetypes of corporate dynasties.
Translation, Not Replication
This article argues that the most successful film adaptations, such as ‘Rear Window,’ ‘Jaws,’ and ‘Psycho,’ don’t just copy their literary sources but translate their core themes into a new, distinctly cinematic language built on visuals, performance, and sound.