: Re: Screenwriting: Help with paragraph length. I have a descriptive paragraph, at the beginning of a scene: INT. VICTIM’S BASEMENT - NIGHT ------, a professional criminal, and serial killer, is hard

@Jamie945

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Ideally, your descriptions shouldn't last more than 4-5 lines per paragraph. A good rule of thumb is to try and condense what you want to describe in a few short paragraphs, with each paragraph describing one aspect of your scene. So in your case, you might have one short paragraph describing the state of the room the murderer is in (if its an important point of your script), while you would have a second paragraph describing the murderer (Is he sweating? Completely calm? Dressed unusually? Does he have some descriptive tic that will eventually give him away?).

Keep in mind, though, a couple of other 'soft' rules - 1) Don't drag your descriptions out over multiple pages. You're writing a screenplay, not a novel. Describe what the audience would see and what's important for them to know about the scene. 2) Each page of your screenplay should ideally have a mix of dialog and other breaks. So if later in your script you find that two people are spending 3 or 4 pages talking to each other without something else happening in the scene, you're going to lose a reader very quickly. Each page of dialog should have at least one line of something descriptive happening in the scene or else a break to another scene.

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