Top 10 Tips to Complete a Creative Writing Project Without Losing Your CreativityWritten by Ginger Blanchette
Have you ever started a creative writing project with great excitement, only to have your interest dwindle as process, itself, interfere with your creativity? How do you keep momentum going and continue to enjoy creative process? Follow these tips for high creativity, fun and success!1.Create a writing environment that inspires you. Create a place in your home or outdoors that calls you to write. Consider light, color, sound, scent, taste, writing materials. 2.Follow The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron. I highly recommend this book. It keeps you focused, observant, playful, and creative - and it keeps you believing in yourself as a writer! 3.Choose your writing project in a joyful way. When choosing a writing project, come from your heart - not your head. Be playful. Be creative about how you choose your project. 4.Make a creative representation of project’s ideal end. Draw, paint - use a creative medium other than writing to represent completed project. Consider, especially, how you will feel when it’s done. Put your model in a prominent place. Use this to trigger desired feeling, before completion - every day! 5.Make a timeline with celebration points. Make it visually appealing. Have a step-by-step outline and celebrate creatively as you complete each step. 6.Create an R&D Team for your project. Contact a number of your friends, colleagues, and readers. Invite them to join your R&D Team. Send them snippets of what you write, questions you have about process, or anything else you want input on - on a regular basis. Their input will keep you going.
| | Developing Screenplay Ideas ... My well runneth --- in many directions!Written by Edward B. Toupin
Recently, I started a screenwriting and movie-making group here in Las Vegas. Our objective was to begin at, well, beginning of process and work all way through to an edited movie. Sounds easy? Yes! Is it really? Not at all.The one thing I ran into at very beginning was problem of demonstrating development of an idea into something that could be used as screenplay material. The big question is, "what's difference between regular material and screenplay material?" The only answer I could come up with was, "a beginning, a middle, and an end." They looked at me like I was kidding, but actually, I'm not. Put simply, a screenplay is a dramatic story told with visuals and dialogue. The screenplay describes actions, environment, dialogue, and situations that move story forward. Screenplays have a formula and a format that has been in place for many decades. Yet, beginning screenwriter sometimes misses this point. I ran into one fellow some months ago who was writing a screenplay that was "325 pages" long! After further discussion, he began to realize that, instead of writing a screenplay, he had a novel with a story that meandered without end. You can use any old idea for your story, but have a point. Don't just write for sake of writing as story will meander around into a traffic jam. If you have an idea, define a theme or objective for story. What's point? What is main character's purpose in "life"? Life? A character's life? Indeed, character does have a life in world you create, but a screenplay is not "real life". It's a metaphor of real life presented in such a way as to represent a particular theme. To write about a real life situation, you have to dissect situation and find underlying theme. Then, using that theme as a guideline, you must reassemble original idea to best represent theme. Indeed, some aspects of true-story might be fictionalized to drive story toward point. For example, my wife is working on a screenplay about medical debauchery in Nevada. After a few passes, she began to realize that story roamed around in circles because of many facets of topic. After much coaching, she began to realize that she had to define one particular point and aim story at it. As a side-effect, physical issues of story would be driving force that leads plot around to reach "the point". After writing and reading screenplays over years, I've given some pointers to folks that usually help them redefine and direct their stories to a solid point. One of main problems, which I reiterate here, is that you have to "define a point". For example, we might come up with an idea that has a bunch of "cool" actions and situations. We then try to write a story to include these ideas because we want them to be in story. But, this approach will usually fail because --- what is point? Define a point, a theme, an objective that encompasses feeling and direction of these "cool" actions and situations and aim your story in that direction.
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