As you prepare to write a screenplay, perhaps to share your perspective on life, express an idea or embark on a new career path, above all trust your personal experience of stories to guide you. This begins with the stories you heard as a child, and the films and shows that you love. As a storyteller and filmmaker, you are what you watch. The writing process is shaped by the curiosity we experience when we hear a story, the resources we draw on when we create, and the link between those two experiences. Looking and listening more deeply will enhance the joy we get from a well-told story: this could be a graceful construction leading to a shattering twist that reframes everything we know about the story’s world, as in Jordan Peele’s Best Screenplay Oscar winner, Get Out (2018). Or, it takes us on a far-out flight of the imagination that immerses us completely, like Guillermo del Toro’s 2007 BAFTA-winning film, Pan’s Labyrinth.
The philosopher, abolitionist and critical thinking champion Ralph Waldo Emerson suggested that in every work of genius, we recognise our own rejected thoughts. Reflecting on that genius helps us to understand and to deepen our admiration, leading us to recognise our assumptions that led to the initial rejection of ideas that could have created a spark. There is pleasure in understanding, leading us to appreciate the insights about human dreams and relationships that a story allows us to experience. We’re excited when we are torn along by a rollercoaster plot, how it manages to grab our emotions - even when we watch it multiple times. As much as we can, we struggle when expressing our story. When watching great work, we see a work of genius transcending our own obstacles gracefully. The history of film, and later, television can be understood as an ongoing effort to refine the relationship between images, sounds and the viewer’s emotional experience. Legendary film director Sam Fuller (Shock Corridor, White Dog), appearing in the rather philosophical crime romance Pierrot Le Fou (1965) directed by Jean Luc Godard, explains: ‘Film is like a battleground: love, hate, action, violence, death. In one word, emotions.’
Your Story Map
The more time you have spent watching TV shows or films, the more you have experienced this relationship already. Expertise in any subject – according to science journalist Malcolm Gladwell – requires 10,000 hours of engagement, so with some additional reflection you can build a rich treasure chest of solutions to writing problems. These facilitate your sense of what works and what doesn’t that you have already attained by years of viewing and experiencing story across all media. To draw from this treasure trove constructively requires charting it. The questions we raise in workshops can assist you in recognising key features in this landscape, perhaps a comfort zone of resonant genres, locating the tropic warmth of childhood favourites, navigating deserts of unclear relevance, up mountain ranges of ambition or down subconscious oceanic depths, yet to be explored.
Meet your teachers
Discussing your writing in workshops or going deep with coaching offers a variety of tools to build on what you see, techniques that show you how you are drawn into a made-up world and to recognise how this process starts upon hearing a title, the genre, or an excited recap from a friend. Based on lifelong exposure to our unique mix of cultural and personal influences, we respond to particular themes, settings, and character traits. With the best work, an insight arrives not straight away but becomes ignited later. Thus, by bringing our ‘selves’ to any good viewing experience, meaning is negotiated, not handed down to us through the screen. You may observe the wide range of individual interpretations when you discuss a film with friends, or a show with family. The first cinema screening you remember, for example, a TV show that generated a family controversy, are all milestones along your creative path. Scenes that reach out to you, setting off thrills, goosebumps or that guide your take on life; beloved boxsets, and streamed series, these you will soon recognise as your teachers. That investigation leads you to the techniques that make you laugh, cry, cringe in your seat. Stories shape our understanding of love, friendship, courage, and justice: can you trace back your influences?
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