screenwriters toolkit

This exercise was submitted by Marilyn Horowitz, screenwriting instructor for NYU’s Graduate Film program. Visit her online at:
http://www.marilynhorowitz.blogspot.com

THE CHINESE RESTAURANT

As a fun exercise this month, with a group, visit a Chinese Restaurant (or get take-out) and record everyone’s fortune cookie message. Then, a week later, contact the people from the group, remind them of their fortune, and find out how closely it resembles what actually happened to them over the previous week. It’s a fun exercise to see how serendipity manifests itself in people’s lives and can later add texture and subtext to a scene.

A scene list is an outline of one-sentence descriptions for each scene in your movie-to-be. It’s a great way of seeing every scene and working out the outline of your story. Writing teachers such as Syd Field teach scene lists as a pre-cursor to writing the entire screenplay. Your Task: Make a scene list for someone else’s film. Here are the steps:
1. Download a screenplay for a movie you’d like to watch.
2. Get a copy of the movie as well.
3. Get a pen and a pack of notecards.
4. Watch the movie and outline. Every time a new scene happens, pause the movie and write a one-sentence description of the scene on a notecard.
5. When the movie is finished, put your notecards aside.
6. Now, get the screenplay that you’ve downloaded. Make a scene list of the screenplay by writing out all of the scene headers onto a sheet (or two) of paper.
7. Lastly, compare your notecards outline to the paper outline from the screenplay.
8. Freewrite: What have I learned?

When developing an idea, two good questions to ask are: Has this been done before? If so, how is my project unique? Your Task: Research your idea. Check out the IMdB search function and do a word search in the “plots” category. This will search the plot summaries of the movies within the database.

One of the best ways to learn is to practice! Your Task: Read Screenwriter John August’s blog entry, “How To Write A Scene.” Following the instructions (minus step 11), grab an article from today’s news and write it into a movie scene.

Google has become so popular as a search tool that it often becomes the only instrument used when doing internet research. Expanding our horizons gives us more information from a variety of sources. Your Task: Read “Conducting Research on the Internet.” Now, using 3 methods from this article, research a random subject to come up with 5 facts.

Are you a visual person? If so, how do you structure your writing? Timelines are visual tools that help create chronological outlines of your characters lives. Your Task: Create a timeline for the internal and external events in your character’s life from the beginning to the end of your story. Internal events are things that happen to your character inside their mind or body. External events are those that happen on the outside (ie. meeting people, going places, etc.).

With the Internet around, it’s easy to forget other avenues of research. These other sources, however, can oftentimes provide more thorough information. Your Task: Re-acquaint yourself with research methods. One quick way to do so is to read this tutorial from the Houston Community College Library.

Go! Your Task: Write a chase scene using one of these methods of travel: horse, helicoptor, boat, foot, car or combo of methods. Now, re-write that same scene 3 other times. Switch the method of travel each time you write it.

Getting out of writer’s block can occasionally be done by pushing oneself out of the ordinary of our everyday lives. Your Task: Go to this week’s headline from “News of the Weird”. Imagine the actions that are taking place in the story (or, the actions that took place to make this story possible). Write a 2-page scene that shows these actions.

Let’s use a transformational moment in our lives to explore screenwriting structure. Your Task: List 3 transformational moments in your life. Pick one incident and answer these questions: What was your life like before the transformation? What took place during the transformation? What were the obstacles to transforming (both inside yourself and external)? How did you face these obstacles? Name the people involved in this transformation. What were their roles in your transformation? What happened to them because of this transformation? What was the outcome for you? Now, create an outline of the specific incidents that occurred before, during and after this transformational experience. Visualize a movie with each of these specific incidents as a scene in your movie. Freewrite: What do I think about my movie? What am I leaving out? What can I add to make it more powerful?