How to come up with ideas for set-pieces: tell friends or family your basic logline, then ask them, “So what would you expect to see in a movie with that concept?” Often they’ll have great suggestions that feel obvious in hindsight.

Remember the thing that most inspired you to write this concept in the first place (another movie, a book, an experience you had, etc.). That’s your touchstone. Keep it close and refer to it often.

Don’t be afraid of the words that come out during the first draft. You’ll never create a startling metaphor or beautiful turn of phrase if you’re self-censoring from the start.

Are you sure your plot is actually saying the same thing as your theme? A theme of ‘violence solves nothing’ is somewhat undercut if your protagonist spends the whole script shooting people.

You don’t always have to guide the reader from one scene to the other with dialogue (“Let’s move out”, “See you there”, etc.). Better to end a scene on a low point than on a cliché.

Identify your own obsessions, then figure out how to make them interesting to other people.

When rewriting, look for dialogue in which a character says the same thing twice. It may be obvious (“Goodbye. See you later!”) or not so obvious (“Don’t you ever knock? It says ‘do not disturb’.”) but it will be there, and your script will be better off without it.

Writing a sequence that features several characters in different locations, with the action happening simultaneously? To make a daunting task seem easier, try writing each character’s scenes separately, then shuffling them together.

Consider giving your antagonist a perfectly good reason for doing what they do. Maybe the protagonist wronged them in the past? This is the classic Marvel comics setup: the hero creates her own worst enemy.

When life gives you lemons, keep working on your script. The work is what matters.

Hurt the characters you care about, and give the lucky breaks to the characters you hate. If the audience is outraged, good. That means they care.

The excitement the reader feels at the action sequences in Act Three is directly proportional to the amount of emotional setup you did in Act Two.

“Atmosphere” doesn’t come from description of buildings and backgrounds. Atmosphere and tone are about what happens to your characters, and how they react to it.

Try to write dialogue that lends itself to multiple interpretations. Ask yourself: how many different ways could an actor say this line?

At the end of the script, when your protagonist catches up with someone they haven’t seen since Act One, it’s not a nice opportunity to see what that character has been doing with their time. The point is to use the encounter to show how your protagonist has changed.