An Effective Guide Screenwriting and Writing: Part One

This is part one of a series 'Your Story' is beginning. Watch these pages for the full 5 parts of the 'Effective Guide To Writing' series, one part will be released every week.

NOTE: These are short, snappy guides full of advice, examples and a path to success, although it important to note that these tips are all based on personal liking.

Below is a list of the themes that will be explored in this series:

Part One: Story-line

Part Two: Characters

Part Three: How To Begin

Part Four: Dialogue

Part Five: How To End

PART ONE: STORY-LINE

Whether you are a budding, or veteran, screenwriter or author, a story-line is still the most vital piece to any project. A story-line are the threads that hold your movie/novel together to form one large, interlaced web of plots, characters, motives, settings and etc.

“Be original, show off your style, and tell your story.”

LINKING SCENES:

The ability to correctly intertwine scenes together and lace them in the right order is quite an underrated gift that you can weaponize in a book, movie or play. After all, the order scenes are placed in can decide the tone and pace of your piece. Some advice that I would give would be to:

-Never set a firm scene timeline, it is important to have the freedom to change the order of scenes to what feels right.

-Use a scene to dovetail into the next.

KEEPING IT FRESH THROUGHOUT

Keeping a story fresh and not boring the audience is one of the greatest challenges anyone writing a script, novel or play. It is extremely difficult to keep an audience entertained for the whole run-time and since entertainment is subjective different people will find different things interesting and enticing. A tip to avoid having a lot of your audience 'clocking out' would be to add something for everyone; include moments of comic relief or funny scenarios, action scenes, moments of reveal and twist, character study and emotional scenes dotted throughout.

More advice would be to:

-Save an important character to be introduced midway through your piece to give the story a fresh breeze e.g. Ransom in Knives Out, Han Solo in New Hope.

-Dot your film/book/play with iconic scenes throughout, try to include at least three. Large scale scenes keep an audience on their feet and entertained.

-Raise the stakes. Simply by raising the stakes and putting a character in danger, can keep an audience excited and zoned into your movie.

A PLOT TWIST

A plot twist is obviously not necessary in every piece of work but can be quite effective if done right! They can subvert the audience's expectations making them even more engrossed in your novel, movie or play than they were before since they have been surprised and want to delve deeper into your story-line.

EXAMPLE:

An example of a great plot twist would be the one in Knives Out (2019). This plot twist is particularly effective because it surprises an engrossed audience and changes our opinions and thoughts on multiple characters in the story. SPOILERS AHEAD. 3/4 through the film the audience is led to believe that Ransom, played by Chris Evans, has made a positive arch and has evolved into the story's hero, but towards the end Rian Johnson, the writer and director, twists all that we have come to believe by making Ransom the villain again. This is effective because it puzzles us (in a good way) and acts as the final piece in the puzzle.

Advice on how to do a plot twist:

-Use a plot twist to subvert the reader's expectations and predictions

-Only make a plot twist when you feel that you need to use it as a weapon and play with an audience or reader's emotions

-'A plot twist must enhance the story moving forward, have strong logic to what came before it and the twist must NOT break any promises', The Closer Look (YouTube Channel).

SUSPENSE AND TENSION

Depending on the genre, a movie, book or play that is aiming to be a drama, action, romance etc. needs tension and suspense to carry it through. No matter how complex, long, exciting your piece is trying to be it needs suspense and tension to make your audience stay stuck in. A nice quote I like to use when referring to suspense in particular is: 'suspense is about making a promise to the audience, telling them that they will find out the whole story. You can play with this power'.

Advice on how to create suspense and tension:

-Withhold key information from the audience for as long as feels right

-Raise the stakes

-Input powerful emotions such as grief and guilt to increase the emotional realism in the story.

-Create intense dialogue and scenes between two opposing forces.

Hope this is helpful. Bye for now.