ONE SIMPLE TRICK TO KILL WRITER’S BLOCK
There is one simple trick to kill writer’s block, and that is to write. If you don’t know what to write, there is always one story you can tell, and that is the story of your own life.
As the old saying goes, everyone in the world has one good story to tell. That story is their own experience as a human being. It is both as unique as a fingerprint (because nobody has ever lived exactly your life) and universal (because aspects of your human experiences are universally understandable to other human beings, i.e. the reader/audience).
The wonderful thing about drawing from your own life is you know the storytelling plays. For example, a lot of the work of story involves constructing the narrative in such a way that the pieces click together, everything is clear and makes sense. But when it comes to autobiography all of that work has already been done by reality. The narrative clicks because everything actually happened. The only job now is telling it in a clear and entertaining manner.
This isn’t to say the next script should be your bio-pic. It can be if that floats your boat. But if the idea is to just kill writer’s block and get the juices flowing, you need only to write scenes. Tell me a story about a funny thing that happened to you that one time.
Give me a few pages about what happened yesterday. Or pull a scene that has some dramatic juice: the day you proposed; the day you graduated high school; the last time you spoke to your father while he was still alive; the time you found out you were going to be a parent; the day your car broke down and your phone was dead and you didn’t know what to do. Anything.
All of these scenes and pages and stories are right there waiting to be brought into the world by the only person in the entire world who can: you.
And they don’t need to be the sole focus of the story. Even in a script that involves fantastic elements like aliens and super-spies and ghosts and robots and dinosaurs and saving the world, the only reason the audience is going to care about that stuff is if they are encountered by characters who are identifiable human beings. And the best way to ground characters and story is with business that you can offer – possibly from your own life.
There is such a thing as an indie drama that’s a slice-of-life story. But we can find pitchable concept, as well. Say you’re an accountant, and you thinking nobody would want to make a movie about watching you run numbers, right? But then we say… hey, what if the numbers tell our accountant that the company is up to something shady? What does the accountant do? Now we have a pitch for a thriller. Now we have a story to tell.
thankyou
thanks for sharing and guiding