There are many scriptwriting and story gurus you can turn to for guidance. I neither call upon them much nor conversely decry them. Wisdom can be found in so many places. But I don’t feel that there are secrets or some set system on how a film can tell a cinematic story well. The lessons regarding the importance of story and how stories must proceed and can be told are as close as your local DVD/video rental shop and movie theater.

As a professional writer, I get opportunities to do SEO (search engine optimization) writing geared to Internet searches, and there seems to be a silly aura around it as if it’s some special code that only certain wise sages know. But in the end, it’s still just plain common sense and smart, tight writing using the right words and understanding the format and medium. (Refer to Jarod Warren’s posts on taglines and loglines, which utilize parallel principles; ad copy writing is also similar.) Don’t let the aura around screenwriting trip you up or intimidate you.

The key is not quite as simple as “tell a good story,” but that still is the mantra. You have to know your medium, vehicle, and audience, and then write with smarts and savvy. You also must understand the elements that make for successful storytelling.

The ancient Greeks gave us a fine basic template: three act structure, and an arc in which the protagonist undergoes a significant and telling change from points A to Zed. It still works, and you can see it in films and on TV and find it in plays and books any day, any hour.

The marvelous thing about cinema is that you don’t have to strictly follow that basic form, though if it works for the story you want to tell, go with it. But visual storytelling offers opportunities to break out of the linear structure and compress time or play with the timeline. I recently again watched Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger, in which he shifts seamlessly and artfully from the story as it unfolds to fill in the back story (and at the same time heighten the mystery) — one of many examples to be found of how the film medium offers creative opportunities to tell a tale.

I learned a valuable lesson in the importance of the story with my first stab at writing a script with a friend who works in film and TV. He had a premise and a central character with lots of potential. But for all the plotting we did together, in the end the story simply did not cohere well enough for the screenplay to be anything more than a good start at the craft best set aside. That’s not to say that one can’t start with such elements (I did it on my next script, which works for me, unlike the previous one). But if the story doesn’t work, a film won’t either.

You must take both the central character(s) and viewers on a journey in which there is an emotional or character change to the protagonist(s), and an emotional impact on the moviegoer. A great story is a tale in which a clear-cut difference occurs between beginning and end.

And the best resource and reference library is easily accessed:
Films and scripts, short stories, novels, plays and even works of long-form (and sometimes also shorter) journalism. Consume them with an eye peeled and attention attuned to how they tell a story, use structure as well maybe realign it, and how a great story is all about change, revelation and discovery. But while being analytical, certainly don’t leave aside your own emotional responses to how a story unfolds and the way it is told. That is what you want to evoke in anyone who reads your script and hopefully sees the resulting movie.

So as you sit down to write, or plot in your head, on a notepad or index cards, or in discussion with a collaborator, never forget that a story is a proverbial journey from one place to another (even if it remains in the same locale) and that significant change(s) of some sort — and hopefully surprising and enlightening change(s) — are the core of all successful movies. With a story that works you’ve conquered the biggest challenge. Without one you are dead in the water.