Further Notes On This Whole Scriptwriting Workshop Thing

So that workshop I’m teaching is coming up this weekend. I have it pretty well planned out (I hope). By the end, I’m planning that the kids will have each written a full scene. Not that I’ll tell them that. At least, not until we get to the end.

Writing can be scary enough. No sense letting them know that they should have a completed thing in less than hour.

I’m pretty sure I know what I want to say and how I want to say it, but just to be sure, I’m trying out my main point on all of you.

You are now my guinea pigs. Feel honored.

We build characters through the choices they make. If you’re writing something like a script for stage, you don’t have pages and pages to get into the heads of these characters. In fact, your characters become pretty dependent on whatever the director and actors envision for them, which can be nothing at all like what you intended.

But speech is an amazing power. Do you people-watch? Do you listen to conversations around you? Language – dialect, cadence, word choice – can tell you so much about a person. There is power in that to guide what a director or an actor imagines your characters to be.

Characters need to make choices, and to make an audience care about those choices, there needs to be some sort of conflict – something, whether internal or external, stands in the way of the characters achieving what they want. Not like a kid whose parents won’t let him eat ice cream before dinner. You need stakes. (Mm . . . dinner . . . steaks . . .)

Say you character learns of some illegal deal. She knows she should go to the cops, but then she may end up dead. Raise the stakes further: maybe a family member, someone she loves, is involved. Now there is internal conflict as well as external, and no option looks good.

Now you’ve made your audience care.

So, character, conflict, stakes. Add in a dash of goals, knowing what your characters want and where you intend the story to go, and writing a scene shouldn’t be so difficult.

But we’ll see. Anything can happen.

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