Video Script Writing

Video Script Writing

Retention-first script writing for any video purpose. The script is the product; production quality is secondary. A rough, real, well-structured script beats a polished script with weak architecture.

Distilled 2026-08-26 from the Learn Anything founder-video session plus a research pass over hook studies, curiosity psychology, narrative transportation, speech-rate experiments, and eye-tracking editing research. Full citations: references/research-digest.md.

Pair with

• A voice skill for the speaker's prose voice (e.g. write-like-eric) when writing as a specific person; the script must survive a table read.
• marketing-copy for offer construction and persuasion strategy upstream.
• eric-video (or the production pipeline du jour) when the script moves to rendering; this skill ends at the script plus its production spec.

Step 1 — Intake (ask before drafting)

• Purpose (founder story, conversion, explainer, short-form, demo)? Selects the playbook.
• Where does it live (by a form, YouTube, feed)? Placement, CTA shape, captions.
• Who watches, and what is their ONE unresolved doubt? The video exists to kill that doubt; without one, recommend against a video.
• Length budget? Sets loop spacing and wpm math.
• Whose voice, and what evidence/receipts do they own? Numbers come from the speaker's own verifiable material.
• The single action after watching? One CTA per script, no exceptions.

Step 2 — Choose the playbook

Read the matching section of references/purpose-playbooks.md BEFORE drafting:

Step 3 — Architecture: draw the loop map first

Before writing prose, produce a loop map table (loop, where it opens, where it closes). Rules, all research-backed (see digest):

• One macro loop: opens in the first 15 seconds, closes in the final 20 percent. Closing it early collapses the reason to keep watching.
• Mid loops at section boundaries; micro-satisfactions (a payoff, a number, a reveal, a laugh) at least every 10 to 15 seconds of script.
• At most 2 loops open concurrently; more overloads working memory.
• Every loop CLOSES by the end. Unresolved loops read as betrayal and damage the next video too (Zeigarnik works on grudges).
• Place a deliberate re-engagement beat (stakes escalation, specificity injection, perspective shift, social proof) at 20 to 30 percent of word count: the known flat zone where momentum fades before commitment sets in.
• A single curiosity gap holds pull for 3 to 4 minutes max; renew or resolve.
• Cognitive load ceiling: 4 to 5 new concepts per minute; break any section past ~300 words; prefer adversative transitions ("but", "the catch") over additive ones ("also", "next").
• Peak-end: put the best moment near the end and end warm with one specific next action, never on a summary or a subscribe beg (viewers skip closings, thanks, and subscribe prompts; this is measured).

Step 4 — The hook (first 15 seconds)

Draft the opening last, against the actual promise. It must pass all three tests (349-video hit-vs-flop study):

1. Reason test: a concrete reason to keep watching (claim, result, question, or stake) lands within ~15 seconds. "Today we talk about X" is a topic, not a reason.
2. Number test: one real, checkable figure early. Hits carry numbers 63% vs 52% in flops. Pull it from the speaker's own verified material.
3. Promise test: the opening engages the exact promise the title/thumbnail or page headline made. Never open adjacent to it.

Failure modes to strike on sight: context dumps (background before a reason to care; a quarter of all flops), greetings ("hey everyone, welcome back"), and promise-only openers ("stick around and I'll show you" asks for credit; give instead).

Mechanics: make the stake second person ("you") where honest; size the gap right (enough context to make the gap visible, not so much it self-closes; curiosity follows an inverted-U); explanatory gaps ("I know what, not why") pull 2 to 3x longer than surface gaps ("what happens next").

Null finding, keep in mind: within the normal delivery band, speaking pace and speed-to-point do NOT separate hits from flops. Concreteness does. Do not fix a weak hook by talking faster.

Step 5 — Draft in spoken register

• Write for the mouth: short speakable sentences, contractions, no semicolon-prose, no written-register curriculum-speak. Read every line aloud mentally; if the speaker wouldn't say it to a friend, rewrite.
• Target the purpose's wpm band (playbooks table). Persuasion is curvilinear in rate: moderately brisk wins, slow reads as low-competence, frantic overloads. Trim dead air in the edit instead of rushing delivery.
• Concrete receipts over adjectives: real numbers, named events, owned evidence ("I did X, here is the artifact").
• Vary sentence lengths; land thesis sentences as their own short sentence.
• If the user rejects drafts as "not my voice", stop generating variants and ask them to dictate or table-read; their spoken phrasing is authoritative and gets spliced near-verbatim.

Step 6 — Attach the production spec

Every script ships with a spec block (the retention levers live in the edit as much as the words):

• Visual change (cut, b-roll, overlay, angle, micro-zoom) at least every 4 to 7 seconds; every extra second of an unchanged scene measurably drops attentional focus. No static 5-second windows anywhere in the plan.
• Put each key line immediately AFTER a visual change: attention peaks about two-thirds of a second after a cut. Hold important on-screen elements at least 1 second, centered, uncluttered (visual complexity depresses focus).
• Seamless jump cuts (dead-air removal) for fluency; use sparing overlap only to re-engage, and never chase cut-speed for its own sake (sustained attention falls at high transition frequency).
• Burn in captions, always: most mobile viewers watch muted and captioned videos finish far more often. The script must work captions-only.
• Click-to-play with a face-forward custom thumbnail; sound-on autoplay never. Lazy-load the player so the page CTA renders first.
• Landing/conversion surfaces: video sits beside the CTA, the CTA stays visible on a 375px screen when the video ends, video stays ungated, end screen points at the single next action.

Step 7 — Pre-ship verification

• Muted test: the whole argument survives captions alone.
• Math: per-section word counts over timestamps land inside the wpm band.
• Loop map complete; every loop closed; never more than 2 concurrent.
• Hook passes reason, number, and promise tests within 15 seconds.
• Exactly one CTA; the end screen or closing line points at it.
• No planned static window over 5 seconds; key lines follow cuts.
• Claims audit: promise only what the offerer controls; no invented urgency; numbers verified against the speaker's own material.
• Table read done by the actual speaker; flagged lines rewritten in their dictated phrasing.

Step 8 — Measure after launch

Strong completion targets by length: under 5 min, 65 to 75 percent; 5 to 10 min, 50 to 60; 10 to 15 min, 40 to 50. Embedded conversion video: 60 to 75 percent completion is strong. Cliffs cluster in the first 15 seconds (hook) and at the 25 to 35 percent mark (missing re-engagement beat); when a cliff appears, fix that moment, not the whole script.

Honesty rules

• Video is conversion-neutral ON AVERAGE across landing pages (large dataset). It pays when it kills the named doubt from Step 1; otherwise it is weight on the page. A/B test rather than assume lift.
• No curiosity bait the video does not pay off inside the video. The resolution lives in the watch, never in a caption, comment, or "part 2".
• Do not over-cut. Diminishing returns are real; processing takes time; scenes under one second cannot encode.
• Engagement is not conversion. Judge the script by the action it produces.