Getting Unstuck: Five Screenwriting Exercises

January 29, 2026

By Sam Zalutsky, faculty, writing for TV, screen, and stage

Last month I finished another semester teaching Storytelling Strategies to NYU Tisch School of the Arts undergraduate film and TV students. It’s an intense but exciting class that’s basically an introduction to dramatic writing and dramatic structure through shorts, features, and TV pilots. We read and discuss a different feature or pilot each week in the lecture portion of the class. In the recitation or section, we watch a lot of shorts and explore students’ own writing through multiple exercises that culminate in their own ten-page short screenplay. It’s always a great pleasure to see what the students create and develop over the fourteen weeks. But the exercises we use aren’t only for them; they are the same exercises I use with my Spalding students and with my own writing. And as I tell them after each round of exercises, here is another way to develop your ideas, to become unstuck, to delve deeper into your own scripts.

I share them with you in case you need a new prompt or exercise in your own work:

The postcard exercise: I have a very large collection of postcards that I have collected for decades. (Despite my husband’s growing intolerance for clutter, when it comes to postcards I have worn him down over many years.) For this exercise, randomly choose two postcards with figures. Write a character biography of a character from the first postcard. Then write one of a character from the second card. You can write them as paragraphs or as a list. What are their fears? Hopes? Dreams? Internal conflicts? You can explore Lajos Egri’s triangle of character: psychology, physiology, sociology. Extra credit: Write a scene between these two characters. Or if you do this exercise with another writer, exchange one of the biographies and then write a scene with one of your characters and one of theirs.

Bad script/scene: So often we limit our writing by pressuring ourselves to write something good on the first round. But we all need to give ourselves permission to write something bad, write that “shitty first draft,” as Anne Lamott says. So, write the worst script/scene you can think of. Three to five pages. I guarantee you that you will find something valuable in those pages. And that’s when the real work begins.

Visual opening: Write a one-page opening scene with no dialogue. I call it a visual opening but you should also use sound. Write the most visual opening you can think of, using color, light and dark, sound effects, action, conflict, behavior. Fill the page.

Note cards: I have a group of different-colored notecards. Orange have actors’ names on them (choose actors that you might not know a lot about), yellow have a genre (romantic comedy, thriller, horror, historical drama, etc.), blue a location (Mumbai, the Australian Outback, the International Space Station, etc.), and green a special object (magic candlesticks, the Mona Lisa, etc.). Shuffle your cards, choose one from each group, and write a beat sheet or outline for a feature film. See what you can come up with.

Overheard dialogue: Students must find two people having a conversation, then listen and record their dialogue. Write it as a scene. Notice if you can find distinct patterns in the way the two speak. Do they speak in complete sentences? Do they use specific dialects? Do they speak honestly? Directly? Or do they use other tactics to achieve their objectives? What are their objectives? Once you’ve written down the dialogue, see how you can revise it and change it to highlight conflict, detail, specificity of language.

After doing these exercises, at the end of the semester, my students wrote first, second, and third drafts of their ten-page scripts. It thrilled me to see how their writing became so much more visual and active through these exercises.

What about you? What exercises do you use to continue developing your craft?

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Sam Zalutsky is currently at work on a horror script, Colonial Dreams, set in Merida, Yucatan, Mexico. His latest feature, Seaside, a revenge thriller starring Ariana DeBose, won the Best Feature Jury Award at the Klamath Independent Film Festival and the Yale in Hollywood Film Festival. His first feature, You Belong to Me, was shortlisted for the Independent Spirit Award’s Someone to Watch Award.