Screenwriting Skills

screenwriting-skills is a set of screenwriting Skills open-sourced by Terry Jia (GitHub user jtydhr88) for Claude Code and Codex, covering film, television and the stage. AI Inspiration World recommends the general sw-* Skills in it: sw-story-structure covers story structure, from plot points and the Save the Cat beat sheet to the Chinese four-part qi-cheng-zhuan-he; sw-dialogue revises dialogue and subtext; sw-scene-craft covers how a scene turns and how to enter late and leave early; sw-character-conflict and sw-premise-theme handle character conflict, premise and the logline. For series work, sw-series-structure covers cold opens, act outs and the shape of a season, sw-series-engine-bible covers the series engine and selling documents such as the series bible, sw-writers-room covers how a room breaks story and handles notes, and sw-sitcom-comedy is dedicated to half-hour comedy and how jokes are built. There are also Skills for genre (sw-genre-anatomy), script format and adaptation (sw-format-adaptation, which can output scripts in Fountain format), the business side (sw-industry-business), Japanese, Korean and French methods, mainland Chinese series practice from planning documents and novel adaptation to approval and production (sw-chinese-series-practice), and Chinese opera writing in both the banqiang system of Peking and Yue opera and the qupai system of Kunqu and Yuan zaju. sw-workflow ties a project together: it tells the AI which Skill to use at each stage and what to deliver, and records progress in story-bible.md so you can pick up where you left off. What sets it apart is that series and opera are treated as media with their own units and rules, instead of being forced into film structure, and where the sources disagree, the Skills keep both positions side by side with a note on when to use each.

Who it's for:people writing film, TV or stage scripts, and readers learning screenwriting, who want AI help with structure, dialogue, series planning or opera lyrics. You'll need an AI coding tool such as Claude Code or Codex. The README says short-form vertical drama and AI-generated comic drama are outside its scope.

Before you start: Claude Code and Codex can both install it from a plugin marketplace, but the plugin installs all 26 Skills at once. We suggest copying only the individual sw-* folders you need from plugins/screenwriting/skills into the folder your AI tool reads Skills from (the README gives ~/.claude/skills for Claude Code and ~/.agents/skills for Codex); you don't need the whole set. The other sw-* Skills all point to a term table inside the sw-workflow folder, so it's safer to copy sw-workflow along with them. The Skills are plain-text guidance carried out by your AI model, with no extra account or key to set up; if you use sw-workflow to manage a project, it creates and updates story-bible.md in your script folder. The Skill text is in Chinese, but answers come in whatever language you ask in, with craft terms mapped back to their original English. The MIT license covers only the Skill text the author wrote; the repo's NOTICE says quotations from the books, published scripts and scores, and the Chinese translations, are not covered by it and remain with their authors, translators and publishers. The README says the content is distilled from 47 craft books and 23 volumes of published scripts, scores and plays; that is the author's own account, and we have not checked it item by item. The repo also holds Skills named after particular writers and works (Chekhov, Yasujiro Ozu and Succession) and four case-study Skills, which AI Inspiration World has not reviewed or recommended.

Based on the project's public documentation. Not tested by AI Inspiration World.