![]() ![]() in Boyhood 2) Your Challenges (Goals)įirst, let’s keep in mind the list of our experiences – they form the foundation for all we do now. This is character development, motivation and arc.Ī life on film: Ellar Coltrane as Mason Evens Jr. ![]() You know exactly how it felt at every stage. You already know how such events unfold, the steps and stages you went through, and how it all ends. If you go back and really spend some time with these events in your life, and be honest about what you went through, you can certainly write about it. What do these events say about us in general as human beings?.What can you say about these events that are absolutely true?.Can you describe a single powerful image that you remember from this time?.What emotions do you associate with each event?.Write until you’re empty! This is the foundation of what we’re going to do here today. ![]() Don’t stop for five minutes but also don’t stop until you get them all down. These might be your memoir moments, or the scenes that would make up the thrilling trailer of your life if it were a movie.įor five minutes, using a timer, write down every meaningful event in your life that comes to mind. ![]() Let’s start with the events you consider milestones. This is your history, the recitation of everything you’ve gone through. The foundation for all that you are today So, let’s explore them.įacing cancer: Drew Barrymore as Jess and Toni Collette as Milly in Miss You Already 1) Your Experiences Rather than shying away from these feelings, you should seek to use them in your work. Your life has formed strong emotions in your life. I suspect it is the source of the power and connectivity of my work and will be for the rest of my career Some of my very best screenplays and works for the stage are directly influenced by my need to explore these issues. Why did the women that I loved have to leave?.Who I am – the whole of who I am – was of course molded and sparked by what has happened to me, and my writing career was, in a very meaningful way, meant to seek out the answers that I felt I so desperately needed: I believe this is what led me to be a writer in the first place. My childhood was marred in many ways by a world without my mother to guide me and, while I love my stepmother and the family we all created together, I never truly got over these traumas and I can chart the ripple of these events even now in my life.Īs a result, themes developed in my own writing of loss, retribution, anger and an overwhelming need to understand my world. My sister died of the exact same illness at age 19, when I was 21.Īs a result, I watched my young father struggle with this loss in his own life and, several years later, watched him remarry and begin a new family. Her sister and my closest aunt died several months later at the tender age of 21. This was, in fact, a portent of things to come. My mother died of ovarian cancer when she was 22 and I was only 6 years old. Now, if I am to be honest, I am a person molded almost entirely by loss at a very early age. But it’s meant to help you find a way to give more emotional meaning and connection to your writing, by using the personal examples in your own life to find those universally relatable emotions to bring veracity and power to what you create. So, the phrase “write what you know” does not mean you have to write about the things in your life that you have personal observed. We watch films to feel, and if the writer is only creating on the surface – that is, if they are not actively in touch with the emotions that they are writing about – the audience will never feel the power behind the word and the script (and the film) will fail. No successful film can reach an audience through intellectual argument alone. Screenplays must be built upon scenes which convey universally relatable emotions because movies, at their most basic level, are emotion delivery systems. That is, I am not feeling what the writer is trying to say. Some of these are very good and will develop into some excellent film, but in so many cases I find that, while the words themselves may be there, the emotions they are meant to relate are missing. I’m currently a judge for the screenwriting competition at the Austin Film Festival and others, and I’m employed in reading more than 100 scripts a month. This quote has been an old saw for writers for as long as I can remember, but its meaning has always been obscured. ![]()
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