by
Donald L. Vasicek
You have your movie idea. You’ve played around with
ways to begin writing it in screenplay form. About the
time you come up with something that feels good, you hit an
obstacle, or more, in the next few pages. You bog down by
page ten, hit quit on your toolbar, or break your #2
pencil, or throw your Bic pen across the room. You wonder
if you will ever be able to write this screenplay,
something your heart continually digs at you to do. What
to do? What to do?
Well, I have a simple solution. If you follow what I
am about to write, I can’t guarantee that you won’t bog
down again. What I can guarantee you is that every time
you begin writing a new screenplay, you’re going to get off
to a fresh and creative start that will keep you writing.
What is this, your muse asks? What this is, is how to
write page one of your screenplay. The first step is to
organize your thoughts. What is the main theme for your
story? Who is the main character? Where is your story
taking place? When is your story occurring? Why are you
writing this story? How did you come up with this story
idea? Most screenplays that get sold and produced address
these questions on page one, or in minute one of the movie.
The second step is to answer these questions.
Start with how you came up with this story idea. Look
inside of yourself for the answer. Search your heart.
Somewhere inside of it, you experienced something that
triggered your desire to write the story you are about to
write. Find what that is, and write it down in a short,
simple sentence. Then, think about why you are writing
this story. The answer to this question should emerge out
of your answer to how you came up with your story idea.
Figure it out, write it down. From these two answers, you
should be able to determine the main theme for your story,
what caused you to want to write your story.
Study your answers to learn how and why you came up
with this story idea. What you find will relate to a
single emotion. This emotion is universal. It will define
your main theme. It will be universal since all human
beings experience the same emotions, and you must be
universal if you want to attract people to your screenplay.
Write down the answer in a simple sentence. By defining
your main theme, you will be able to define who your main
character is going to be. Don’t deny yourself this fact,
your main character is going to be you. At the least,
he/she is going to be some part of you, that part that
strongly relates to your main theme. The last two answers
should come more easily.
Where is your story taking place? Relate how, why,
who, what to where? Here, you can play around a little
bit. This is easy because you know quite a bit about your
story now. You’ll probably come up with a setting that
relates closely to you. By coming up with the setting for
your story, you can also easily determine when the story
will take place. By now being aware of how, why, who,
what, and where, your muse will beckon you to establish the
appropriate time of your story, when. When should your
story take place is easy if you think about how you feel
now as compared to how, why, who, what and where. Once you
have your answers, step three is that you need to come up
with a visual metaphor that begins your screenplay.
This visual metaphor must reflect the how, why, who,
what, where, and when of your story. In my produced
screenplay, “The Crown” (changed by the producer to “Born
to Win”), the how was a vacant place in my heart that was
created in my childhood. The why was how I was raised.
The who was me. The what was trusts were broken. The
where was in a small town in Nebraska. When was the
present, but I made my main character a 14 year-old
boy, when I was fourteen. The visual metaphor surfaced out
of the what, trusts were broken. The single emotion,
trust, became the main theme of my story. The visual
metaphor on page one of “The Crown” is a butterfly
fluttering away from a gravestone symbolizing that to let
go is to trust. The boy’s transformation arc (all well-
done movies have at least one character going through a
transformation arc during the movie, and the key character
for this to occur is with your main character) in the story
was based on this theme. Once he let go of his deceased
mother who died when he was a little boy, in his mind, she
broke the trust he had with her. She left him. He had to
learn how to let go of her in order to learn how to trust.
There you go, you know how to write page one of your
screenplay, and you can get up in the morning and still
like yourself. How about that?
Exercises
1. Write down the movement that begins your screenplay.
2. Write down the metaphor for your theme.
3. Write down the setting for your story.
Now, go for it! Write!
Donald L. Vasicek
The Zen of Writing
http://michaelc.nextmp.net/wordpress
dvasicek@earthlink.net