Morphism between projective schemes induced by surjection of graded rings

I think a good strategy could be to verify the statement locally, and then verify that the glueing is successful, as you said. Let us call $\phi:S\to R$ your surjective graded morphism, and $\phi^\ast:\textrm{Proj}\,\,R\to \textrm{Proj}\,\,S$ the corresponding morphism. Note that $$\textrm{Proj}\,\,R=\bigcup_{t\in S_1}D_+(\phi(t))$$ because $S_+$ (the irrelevant ideal of $S$) is generated by $S_1$ (as an ideal), so $\phi(S_+)R$ is generated by $\phi(S_1)$. For any $t\in S_1$ you have a surjective morphism $S_{(t)}\to R_{\phi(t)}$ (sending $x/t^n\mapsto \phi(x)/\phi(t)^n$, for any $x\in S$), which corresponds to the canonical closed immersion of affine schemes $\phi^\ast_t:D_+(\phi(t))\hookrightarrow D_+(t)$. It remains to glue the $\phi^\ast_t$'s.