On Writing a Screenplay – River
Above is a visual aid for what is written below if you would rather listen than read!
A short summary of my process and journey to this point: Hi, I’m River Magee, a senior at LREI, and I wrote my very own screenplay for my senior project. I originally started with a story centered around a murder, more specifically the murder of a friend. I thought it would be an engaging idea of which I could build interesting characters and impactful events around. However, as I thought of the story’s plot points and the ultimate conclusion of the narrative, I noticed I really had no idea where to go. I had no personal experience with murder (luckily) and couldn’t find a way to create a compelling and convincing world for my viewers to enjoy. I figured out that if I couldn’t relate to the people I was writing about or the actions that were taking place, there was no chance that anyone else would. It took far longer than I thought to shift my plot to a theme that felt closer to home, and a perspective I could write from confidently and passionately. Unfortunately, now that I had an idea about what to center my writing around, I realized that I had little to no knowledge in regards to how to structure a screenplay, and much less a good screenplay. I started by watching movies people had suggested to me in order to gain an analytical view of what makes a movie entertaining and memorable. I watched movies such as The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Fight Club, Chunking Express, The Never Ending Story, Thelma and Louise, Super Dark Times, The Wolf of Wall Street, and many others. Not all of the movies I saw were the greatest or most entertaining, but regardless, each of them had something to teach me even if it was something not to do. Along with this I also read Screenplay, by Syd Field, where he talks about the general structure that all great screenplays follow. This is what I used as the basis for my story before I even began adding characters. I created a list of four things to follow as I started: The Ending, The Beginning, Plot Point 1, and Plot Point 2. As I had learned, in order for a screenplay to work, the writer must know how their story ends before they can begin the journey towards it. From there, everything else will begin to fall into place. I had to re-outline these specific ideas many times until I landed on a narrative that I felt could last at least 90 minutes. With everything in place, it was astonishing how much faster I could write and how much better I felt about the scenes I had created. Beforehand, I would write a scene in the morning and by the afternoon I wanted to delete all of it and start from scratch. It was incredibly difficult to make dialogue that I actually believed, characters that I liked, or even events that felt important or realistic. The only I found around this was just to continue writing, despite any judgments I may have had. I knew I wanted to make a story that accomplished its goal accurately and included consequences that wouldn’t just disappear by the time the movie was over. I didn’t want to write a piece that had a cliché happy Hollywood ending, where everyone arrives at the conclusion ultimately freed from conflict. I wanted the obstacles of the story to have lasting effects beyond the final scene, in the universe, I had created for my script to take place. Overall, writing a screenplay was so much harder than I could have imagined. It tested my creativity, my empathy, my self-consciousness, and my perseverance. However, to be able to look back at more than 20 pages of a movie and feel like it’s the beginning of something worth watching is a truly unique and rewarding experience that is worth the many obstacles one must cross. Here is my Screenplay. Enjoy!
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