These tips can also be found on Script Angel and are based on excerpts from John Yorke in for his excellent 'Advanced Story Course'

1. Get your hooks in early – the first 10 pages are the most important. If the person reading the script is bored, so will an audience be watching it and they’ll switch channels!

2. Have a narrative thread running right through, it doesn’t need to be continually taught but it mustn’t break or the audience will drift away. Create a sense of forw...

How to Plug the Holes in Your Script - veteran script doctor Michael Ray Brown runs down a few questions to ask yourself before you send that script out into the world.

Writers often ask me what I look for in a script. I have only one rule: the script must capture my interest and keep me wanting to see what happens next. But how do you do this?

• Do you load up your script with action?
• Do you keep trying to shock or surprise your audience?
• Do you create a "Whammo Chart" like Joel Silve...

1. Is it properly formatted?

2. Proper spelling and punctuation. Sentence fragments okay.

3. Is there a discernible three-act structure?

4. Are all scenes needed? No scenes off the spine, they will die on screen.

5. Screenplay descriptions should direct the reader's mind's eye, not the director's camera.

6. Begin the screenplay as far into the story as possible.

7. Begin a scene as late as possible, end it as early as possible. A screenpla...