Screenplay vs Script: What's the Difference?

A script is any written text meant to be performed. A screenplay is a script written for the screen.

So every screenplay is a script. A stage play script is not a screenplay, because it is not for the screen.

Most people use the words interchangeably and are understood. There are a few situations where the distinction carries real information, which is what the rest of this covers.

The family

"Script" is the container word. The others are members of it, distinguished by the medium they are written for.

Why the medium changes the writing

This is the part worth knowing, because the formats are not just different templates.

Screenplays are visual and lean. You write what the camera sees and what the audience hears. Nothing else. No interiority, no "she remembered the summer of 1994" unless it is on screen somehow. Roughly one page per minute of screen time, so a feature runs 90 to 120 pages.

Teleplays are structured around breaks. Commercial television scripts carry act breaks written to land before a break, because the structure is built around keeping viewers through one. Streaming has loosened this and not removed it. Episode lengths vary by format. A half-hour comedy script is a different animal from an hour-long drama.

Stage plays are dialogue-led. The audience is at a fixed distance with no close-ups, so the words do the work that a camera would otherwise do. Stage directions are sparser, because a director and a designer will make those decisions.

Radio and audio drama must convey everything through sound. No visual channel at all. That makes it the most constrained of the four. In my view it is also the best training there is in writing dialogue that carries information without sounding like it.

The formatting is genuinely strict

Screenplay format is not a style preference. It is an industry standard. Readers do use deviation as a first filter.

The basics:

• 12pt Courier, always

• Scene headings in caps: INT. KITCHEN - NIGHT

• Action in present tense, describing only what is seen or heard

• Character names centered and capitalized above their dialogue

• One page roughly equals one minute of screen time

That page-to-minute rule is why format is enforced so tightly. It only holds if everyone uses the same margins and font. Once it holds, a producer can read the page count as a running time.

Which word to use

Say "screenplay" when you mean a film script specifically, especially anywhere professional.

Say "script" when you mean the general category, or when the medium is obvious from context.

Say "teleplay" in television contexts, though "script" is used constantly there too.

Say "spec script" for one written on speculation, without a commission, which is how most writers start.

Nobody will correct you for saying "script" about a film. Saying "screenplay" about a stage play will get noticed.

Why many writers draft the novel first

A lot of films start life as novels. There is a practical reason beyond rights deals. A novel makes you build the whole story: what everyone wants, what they hide, what happened before page one. A screenplay throws most of that away, because the camera cannot show it.

That sounds like wasted work. It is the opposite. You cannot find the essential scene until you know what it is essential to. Writers who draft the novel first adapt from a complete story rather than from a logline. It shows on the page.

Two things change when you move from prose to screen:

Interiority disappears. Everything a point-of-view character thinks has to become something visible or audible. The novel is where you work out what they think. The screenplay is where you find the action that shows it. Dialogue skills transfer almost completely, better than anything else does.

Length compresses roughly four to one. A thriller novel of 80,000 words becomes a screenplay of about 20,000, because the camera does the description.

Where FeelyWrite fits

FeelyWrite is built for the novel stage of that process. Story DNA holds every character's wants, secrets and voice while you draft, which is exactly the material an adaptation later draws on. It has been tested past 500 pages, so a long, complex story stays consistent all the way through.

When the novel is finished, export it as a complete manuscript. Then take the story into dedicated screenwriting software for the screenplay format itself.

If you are writing prose in any genre, that is exactly what it is for.