Doubtless we’ve all heard or thought about the discipline of screenwriting: Write every day. Pound out pages. The only way out is through.

In that context, we can understand discipline to mean rigor or persistence in our commitment to the craft of writing.

And that’s a good thing.

But when you boil down screenwriting to its most basic core component — a scene — and you realize that whenever we write a screenplay, we write 60-90 scenes (varying in number depending upon the story’s genre, complexity, amount of action versus dialogue, etc), I think it’s fair to say that in one way, we can look at screenwriting as scene-writing.

Scene-writing requires disciplines as well – and I mean that in a specific way. Yes, there are certain guidelines we should learn to help us envision, block out, and write scenes — What’s the point of the scene; What is its Beginning, Middle, and end; Enter later, exit early — and that’s a discipline we need to learn.

But the point I want to make in this post is about another type of discipline.

Imagine the story you are writing. Imagine that this story exists in its own world. Time is continuous in that world. 24 hours in a day is the same there as here. Characters fill out that time doing what they do just like we, as humans, do. That is to say that our characters live complete, full lives in their own story world.

So in a sense what we do as screenwriters is choose which moments in their lives to use in our stories as scenes. We dip our hands into that world and scoop out the most important, key moments to become the component parts of our movie.

Given this perspective, it’s clear that it is as important what we choose to omit from that story world as what we choose to include.

To do that, consistently for each scene and throughout the entire script, requires a certain kind of discipline, one that insists that what moments we choose from our story world be:

* Memorable
* Critical
* Tied directly to the plot

Not only that, when and where we choose to enter or exit a scene also requires the same discipline. It’s easy to write everything we see in our mind’s eye. But your job is not to write a documentary based on your story world. Your job is to write a movie. And as Hitchcock famously said, “Movies are life with the dull parts cut out.”

So be disciplined in your approach to screenwriting. But also be disciplined in terms of scene-writing, too.