How to Write Good Action Lines in a Script | How to Write Better Scene Description & Action Lines

Here’s a screenwriting secret:

Grammatical errors can—if used properly—make your action lines more visual and easier to read.

Please make this mistake. Your screenwriting career will thank me!

Trigger Warning: I'm going to be talking about grammar. If you don't like grammar, well, tough—but seriously, as a screenwriter, even if you're not in love with grammar, you still need to know grammar if you want to call yourself a screenwriter.

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Visually Useful “Mistakes”

What is this mistake that I'm talking about? I'm talking about sentence structure and specifically how you create a sentence. The mistake that you really should try to use more often in your screenplay is a sentence fragment. This is actually another tool in your toolbox to write more visually!

A sentence fragment is something that your English teacher probably told you to never use, and normally your English teacher would be right. When you're doing formal writing, like in an essay a news article, you don't want to use a sentence fragment—but for a screenplay, if you do it the right way, it can actually help your writing.

There are good ways to use sentence fragments in your screenplay and there are bad ways to use it. I’ll break them down in a sec.

What’s a Sentence Fragment?

Let's actually talk about what a sentence fragment is. Here's where we're going to get into that dreaded “grammar.” A complete sentence is defined as an independent clause, meaning it is a single thought that can stand alone. That’s what makes it independent.

In order to be an independent clause, it needs to have a subject and a verb. The subject is the thing doing something in the sentence, and the verb is the thing that it's doing.

Example: The cat languishes on the floor.

“Cat” is the subject while “languished” is the verb. That statement is an independent clause, but if you're missing either the subject or the verb, you’ll likely end up with a sentence fragment.

Verbless Fragments

How you write that sentence fragment and especially the context surrounding it will determine whether or not it's good for your screenplay or bad for your screenplay. For example, if you leave out the verb, you get something like:

The cat on the floor.

What is the cat doing? You have to kind of try to figure it out. Without that context, we don't really know what it's doing or why, and so that’s what turns this sentence fragment into the kind that you want to avoid in your screenplay.

Basically, because there's no verb there—and all storytelling is about people doing stuff—your scene description and action lines will suffer from not having proper sentence structure or context.

So how do you use it? To infer camera angles, like close-ups.

If the context has established a charcter’s point of view, for example, then you can use the verbless fragment to communicate the object of the subject’s gaze:

He stares at the contents of the bloody suitcase:

A hand full of rifle rounds.

The tattered nightgown.

The charred book.

See how that pithily infers a close-up without using a camera angle?

If used in this context, the verbless fragment is your best friend to convey visual information cinematically in as few words as possible.

Subjectless Fragments

Another good use of the sentence fragment that can make your writing stronger is where you remove the subject. Here’s what I mean:

Languishes on the floor.

However, like with the other type of fragment, this only works if we already know what the subject is based on the context of the sentences before and after that fragment. One-line screenplays don’t exist for a reason!

If you've already established that there's a cat named Mickey who is depressed, you could write something like:

Mickey hangs his head.

Languishes on the floor.

Stares wistfully out the window….

You can tell that you don't have to write the word “he” in the sentence “languishes on the floor” because we know that based on context that it’s poor Mickey the cat who is languishing.

That’s why you can kind of get away with this subjectless fragment in screenwriting. Because screenwriting is all about brevity and pithiness, when you drop the article or the subject from the sentence, if you know what what the subject is based on context if you know who that noun or pronoun is supposed to be then you can shorten the sentence to make it more direct.

Context Determines Applicability

An example of a bad fragment would be this:

As he sits alone in the dark kitchen.

it sounds like something's going to come after it right it's because normally that phrase would be a dependent clause with a comma and then there'd be something after it. If you just have it by itself, it don't make no sense!

However, if you already know who is sitting and what the context is for that scene, you could use the good fragment of:

Sits alone in the dark kitchen.

That's why you need to be able to distinguish not just what a sentence fragment is, but also the right way and wrong way that it should be used or not used in your screenwriting.

Show, Don’t Tell Using Sentence Fragments

This example is from Alien (1979). This is one of the first times this type of minimalist writing was introduced into screenwriting, and set the stage for how we write screenplays nowadays. You can see a ton of sentence fragments in here!

A bunch of those action lines in the scene description are technically fragments, but they are understandable based on the context. You're trying to write what people can see, and most of what we see in movies is people saying and doing things. Even though these are fragments, we know who's doing what, what's going on in the scene, and what the surroundings are. Together, the fragments craft a vision in our imagination.

This means that we can read through it quickly and still understand what's happening. It's explaining what's going on in a much more visual way without worrying about the extra words in there that we don't actually need. This is a crucial technique at the heart of visual storytelling!

So, you can use sentence fragments by omitting the subject or verb if you know based on context what the subject is OR the verb is implied. Execute this “show, don’t tell” trick to make your screenwriting more direct, brief, and pithy. That makes for a better reading experience—and an engaged reader.

Want to learn more techniques like these? Watch my free Visual Screenwriting Masterclass!

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