Advice For Those Just Starting Out

First Steps To Writing A Screenplay – Alan Watt [Founder of L.A. Writers’ Lab]

Filmcourage

Published

July 3, 2024

[Watch the video interview on Youtube here]

Film Courage: In the 90-Day Screenplay the writer does not start writing the first draft until 30 days have passed?

Alan Watt [Founder of L.A. Writers’ Lab] and Author: The first four weeks are all about imagining the world of your story. We do a lot of stream of consciousness writing exercises. In fact, the first week you don’t even investigate structure because I really believe that the subconscious is a seat of your genius.

What you do is just imagine your characters in relationship to other characters because the moment you start to explore plot or the moment you want to start to put a frame around this story, we can get stuck. It’s a process of going from the general to the specific. Imagining the world of the story, it’s really just about asking questions and holding them loosely like:

-Who is this character?

-How old are they?

-Where do they live?

-Who are they in relationship to?

And quickly writing it down. I’ll do it long hand on a yellow legal pad. As you start to allow the characters to exist in this world it starts to lead to the structure questions which happens in the second week of the workshop.

That’s what I mean by marrying the wildness of your imagination which is just imagining the world without imposing structure to the rigor of story structure which is the experiential questions.

What happens is sort of nonlinear narrative starts to emerge and it’s sort of like a Polaroid coming into focus. It’s not chronological. It’s not like this happens, then this happens, then this happens. It’s more akin to this Polaroid where you…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).