Three ways to stimulate and direct the ideas for screenwriting: The page is empty. Where to start?
Three ways to stimulate and direct the ideas for screenwriting:
Characters: You start thinking about a person, not any kind of person but an interesting one. Start in the person’s here and now and (re) construct his or her life. Eventually you will get to know your character better, concerning traits like job, family, lifestyle, hobbies, car, clothing, habits, attitudes, activities in different fields, history, knowledge, education, social status, origin, and friends. The more the better. Go on writing all down. Create some other characters, or go straight over to thinking about what could happen to your person that could entirely change its life. Maybe you find some good plots as well as some more interesting characters and, suddenly, have the entire structure for a screenplay.
Scenes: One single scene occupies you. You can see everything clearly before your mental eye. Then you start reconstructing the immediate past of the ‘seen’ and imagine what can happen in the next moment. You rebuild the participant’s characters and personal histories. Afterwards, you turn back to the situation. If it is interesting, try making a plot of it and invent a good story that leads towards it. If not, think of what could happen to dramatize the action. At the very beginning, don’t care about likeliness; just try thinking freely of what could possibly happen. Finally, if you have found a course of action and dialogue, you start with characters, and structure.
Markets: Although nobody believes you, you know that Wild West is going to come back. You have THE setting: the prairie. What can happen? Settlers attacked by Indians? One survives and makes it to a town. Bad luck for him: just gangsters. Suddenly you realize that you have a whole action made out of a simple setting. As you know the genre well, you see its possibilities and frontiers. Anyway, following the market approach, it is better to combine already given genres instead of sticking close to a certain style, which could lead to the disrespectful predicate: copy.
These are just a three of many ways to construct a complete screenplay. But if you follow just one of them to its end, you will be occupied for quite a while. In any case: the first line and the following result faster when sticking to such a creation scheme.
