I teach a screenwriting class to teenagers once a week, and it’s challenging for a number of reasons. The first reason is that, being teenagers they have rather eclectic taste. When I mentioned how great of a director Alfred Hitchcock was, one of them asked me to compare him to Michael Bey. I can tell you that a lively discussion ensued. But I digress. The other challenge is getting them to think outside the box.
We had an exercise in class the other day where I asked all of them to outline their script using the Hero’s Journey as laid out by Chris Vogler in his book The Writer’s Journey, using the 12 stages of the journey to map out the major moments of their stories. The one consistent thing that kept cropping up was that they all had at least one moment where they hadn’t figured out how to get from one point to the next.
That in and of itself isn’t anything special. It happens to every writer all the time. But how do you get past that mental block. How do you get from point A to point B without having a scene feel contrived, cliche or forced.
You think outside the box.
So how do you think outside the box? As a writer, you must consider yourself to be a creative person. You must see yourself as a person who looks at life a little differently than other people. So here are some ways to take advantage of that creativity to make your writing stand out.
1) Stream of Consciousness:
This is essentially an exercise in thinking out your story to its logical conclusion. The great thing about doing a stream of consciousness, however, is that you can allow your mind to go in wild and crazy directions. You can either do it in your head or on your keyboard, and you can start over again, making different choices if you don’t like the choices you made on the first pass. For example, one student has a reluctant hero, but he’s convinced by a mentor to start the adventure. But when he gets to the location where the adventure is to be taking place, things aren’t as he expected. He wants to leave, but, as she says, something keeps him there. I asked her what that something was, and she couldn’t answer. So we went on a stream of consciousness, conjuring up all sorts of ideas for what could possibly keep him in a place where he didn’t want to be in the first place. Nothing was out of bounds and anything could make sense. After only 5 minutes we had several ideas for her to consider, and whichever choice she makes will be the correct one.
2) Ask yourself questions:
You’re working on scene A and you have to get to scene B, but nothing is making any sense. At this point, thinking outside the box means considering that either scene A or scene B might not be the right scene. I’m sure you’ve done some exercise like writing out all of your scenes on note cards, and putting them on a wall. The story always flows well at this point, and it looks like all your going to have to do is fill in the blanks. That is, until you actually start writing the scenes. A lot of things change at that point, and all of a sudden it doesn’t make sense that Carrie would shoot Joe after finding him in bed with Laurie because she’s never owned a gun and has no way of getting one. So what do you do? You work out in your head or on the keyboard the series of events that would logically follow that event, and you do that by asking yourself a series of questions. Would she curse both of them out before storming out of the room? Would she cower in the corner and start to sob? Would she immediately take out her cell phone and call a lawyer?
3) Look at your story as though you’re reading it for the first time:
Much like asking yourself questions, you need to be able to look at your story with fresh eyes. Put yourself in the shoes of a studio or agency reader. If a person like that was reading your script for the first time, how would they react to certain scenes? Are those scenes as dramatic or as funny as they could be? Is it going to matter that you never really filled in that hole that keeps the story from really making sense? Thinking outside the box in this scenario is allowing yourself to step outside yourself and look at your script as though you were looking at it with the eyes of someone else.
These exercises can be challenging if you haven’t tried them before. Especially if you’ve never had a script evaluated by a professional reader. We can evaluate your script here and show you what professional readers are looking for, and help you figure out how to see things you’ve written as though seeing them for he first time. Click the link below to see how we can help.