#WritingAdviceWednesday – Writing Exercises: Make Room for Anxiety
Writing Advice Wednesday
Writing Exercises
After a holiday break, it time to start flexing those muscles again, with more writing exercises.
As well as a relevant video essay I’ve found, here’s a writing exercises to help kickstart your creative process. It’s exercises like this that form part of my One Hour Screenwriter course, which will help you write an entire feature film script in 22 weeks. You can purchase it at the shop here. You can also read testimonies here that show my methods have worked for many different writers.
This week, it’s time to get a room…
Describe a Room and How It Made You Feel.
Take a moment and describe a room you remember vividly from your childhood. What kind of room was it? What was in the room? Make a list as quickly as possible of all the physical details you remember.
Look in every corner in your mind’s eye. What do you see? What do you hear? Jot down memories, descriptions and objects as you remember them.
Write as rapidly as possible. Write in no particular order. Don’t worry about being creative, articulate or interesting. Just write!
Next, populate the room. Remember the individuals from your childhood who would come from and go to that room. How do they enter? How do they inhabit the space? What are they doing in the room? What do they want? What do you or others do in response?
Describe each person you remember in the room as clearly and specifically as you can.
Describe your reactions to those people. Are you glad they came or are you anxious for them to leave? Why?
Now have those people speak. What is are the replies or how are people answering one another? How do you feel about these people? Describe your interactions with as much detail as you can.
Continue to write and remember the time and place. Do the room and/or people in it spark any other memories from childhood or beyond? Do any of the objects in the room have a particular meaning or evoke specific feelings? Describe these in greater detail.
Write for about 10 minutes or until you have exhausted all your memories of the room and people in it. Dig deep to find the child you once were.
Now try writing this exercise from your main character’s perspective and concentrate on your character’s fears. Many of our deepest fears originate in childhood.
Can you use this exercise to further excavate your character’s fears? What did you discover? How can you use this material in your character present? How can you make those childhood fears active in the here and now?
How are those childhood fears activated in the immediate story as it unfolds in Act Two?
Video Essay of the week
Speaking of fear and details, relating to reactions, now you see it has a great video essay:
Let me know what you think of this week’s writing exercise by emailing me at [email protected]. I’d love to hear from you as we go forward with more of these writing exercises. Next week, it’s time to end it all…
Until then, remember- all you need to do is Get Started and Keep Going!
– Laurie
Create a visual map for a character’s emotional journey. Pull stories from character rather from rote story structure beats. Some of the largest international media companies, use this in story and character development.
A clear concise guide for writers and producers to have by their side as they embark on a project. It gives a really vital reminder of what is key for story success.
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