10 Story Techniques You Must Use to Sell Your Script

Selling your script can be extremely nerve racking to any Filmmaker, regardless of how awesome your script is. There are, however, some tried and true techniques that will help your script sell. Check out 10 Story Techniques to sell your script

1. Know the 10 most popular genres
Step 1 in writing a script Hollywood wants to buy is knowing the 10 most popular story forms. If you write a script that is not based on one or more of these genres, your chance of a sale plummets. They are Action, Comedy, Crime, Detective, Horror, Fantasy, Love, Myth, Science Fiction and Thriller.
2. Combine 2 or 3 genres
In the genre-focused entertainment business, the most important story strategy today is to mix genres. 99% of films made, not just in Hollywood but worldwide, are some combination of the ten most popular genres. Why? It all goes back to that old rule of selling: give the customer 2 or 3 for the price of 1. This, in a nutshell, is how Hollywood works.
Let me give you some examples. The super-popular Bourne films are Action + Thriller. Knocked Up is Comedy + Love. Little Miss Sunshine is Myth + Comedy. Titanic, the most popular movie of all time, is Love + Disaster Film + Myth. The Dark Knight is Crime + Myth + Fantasy. The Harry Potter stories, the most popular books of all time, are Fantasy + Myth + Horror + Coming-of-Age Drama. The Pirates of the Caribbean movies are Fantasy + Action + Horror + Myth.
3. Find the right genre for the story idea
The single biggest decision you make in the entire writing process occurs right at the beginning, when you are developing your premise, or story idea. The decision is: which genres should I use for this idea? Here’s a shocking but eye-opening fact: 99% of scripts fail at the premise. And why? It’s not because their original story ideas weren’t good. They fail because the writers didn’t know the best genres to use to go from a 1-line idea to 2-hour, 120-page script.

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