When you’re writing a screenplay, you tend to think about your story before you begin to write. I have started to write several screenplays and life has interrupted me, work has interrupted me…all the screenplays are there, waiting for me to finish them. ‘Yeah, good luck with that.’
Ideas for movies dance around in my head all the time
I remember a filmmaker who won second place award for his short film, “How I Became A Movie Theatre Murderer” in our film festival telling me in an interview (I shot it with my iPhone and later edited in iMovie), that his idea for the movie came from an incident. You can watch the short interview and listen to his answer, in the video.
This morning, I checked my email. Then I got up, turned around, and my dog Tiko was sitting behind my chair resting on his legs with his head up. He was staring at the door across from him. I pet him and said, “Look at you, Pikachu,” something I’ve been saying for years (not sure why other than it rhymes).
“What are you doing? Thinking about life?”
Then it hit me like a writing prompt. ‘Wait.’ I exclaimed inside my head, as I quickly sat down and began to write this.
What if…?
That is the question screenwriters ask themselves all the time, “What if?”
Aris Tyros, the filmmaker from Canada I interviewed in San Diego, asked himself that question during the incident that prompted him to make his movie. He went on to win so many awards, he could barely fit all the laurels in the movie poster.
That question prompts more writers and filmmakers than probably any other question. What follows it depends, of course. What if this happened to me? Or my mom? What if one day…? What if my dog actually thinks?
Answer the question
When I asked my dog if he was thinking about life, you may be surprised—no, you may be shocked! He did not answer me. But had he answered me, what would he have said?
I let my imagination stay in control, and began to imagine what dogs think about when they’re just sitting there. What would dogs think about if they were thinking about life? Especially Tiko. His life is all about me. Unlike me, his world revolves around me. My world revolves around a lot of things, people, and him…it definitely revolves around his presence in my life. Don’t know what I’d do without my little buddy.
If you write fiction, you’re able to let your mind wander away the farthest. If you write non-fiction, you tend to keep going back and staying grounded on your subject. But creativity and imagination are always a part of storytelling. That is why it’s a way to allow our child to come out to play. It’s healthy.
Whether you write for a blog, a magazine, a book or a screenplay, whatever you write—your writing is storytelling. Even a news article requires a bit of creativity. In my journalism classes we learned about how our writing must answer the “5 W’s” and we had to memorize them: What, When, Where, Who, Why. And the order of these things being answered depended on how you were presenting the news.
There is something called the “inverted pyramid” style. You tease the answers to the 5 why’s when you are broadcasting on TV, because you want the viewer to stay engaged. In newspaper articles (our instructor was a retired editor for the newspaper in San Diego), your style was flipped like a pyramid right side up. Answering the most important W’s upfront. He said that was because people who read long articles would get frustrated if you didn’t satisfy their need within the first three paragraphs.
When you are imagining your story, you find yourself asking those questions beyond just a simple, “Huh, I wonder if…” as a thought, and stop there.
That’s what most of us do. We ask ourselves questions, begin to actually go there, and then we’re either distracted or deliberately stop ourselves because we feel we could do better things, more useful things.
In a world that is overwhelmed with news we need and a lot of propaganda, remember to let the child inside yourself come out to play. Take your thoughts and the wonders out for a ride inside the endless universe that lives inside your mind. You’ll be surprised at the answers you’ll find to life’s most pressing questions. Even your own personal dilemmas.
Watch the movie, How I Became A Movie Theatre Murderer, won IMFF 2017 and GMFAwards in the same year:
You Just Had to Go There Didn't You