My Screenwriting Experience

My sophomore year of college I took a screenwriting class.

If you have the chance and are passionate about writing, I highly recommend a screenwriting class, if this is available to you. 

I initially had wanted to go into screenwriting, and although I realized screenwriting was not really my cup of tea, I learned so much from this class to use for my own novels. 

One thing I had mentioned in my NaNoWriMo Experience post was my love hate relationship of beat sheets and planning my writing.

 One of the biggest things in screenwriting is planning, planning, planning. Which as a writer, I should be way better at than I am, and I am trying to change that terrible habit.

In screenwriting, we had post it notes of every possible scene that I stuck all over my wall. (Really. I had about one hundred post it notes on my dorm wall at one point. My roommates probably thought I was going over the edge....I thought so too at times.)

And we had character sketches

Beat sheets

Beat sheets

Beat sheets.

Did I mention we had a couple beat sheets?

What are beat sheets?

Well I'm glad you asked invisible person. 

A quick screenwriting lesson:

In screenwriting, a beat sheet is essentially a plan of every "beat" of every scene of a movie. A "beat" is essentially the pivotal point in every scene, or why this scene is important to the movie's plot. So we had to plan out every scene in our movie before we started writing.

If you do a quick google search, you can find time breakdowns and blank beat sheets for movies that may be helpful for you novel. And by may I mean, it will make your life was easier.

I am hoping to be better about planning out my chapters before I start writing. 

But......

I haven't had much luck with that, clearly. 

Another thing we did was character sketches, which I loved. 

A character sketch is essentially a narrative of your important characters ie. protagonists, antagonists, and any other pivotal characters. 

Character sketches allow you to understand the psychology of your characters- all their inner workings, their personalities, motives, background, and anything else that would alter your character's decisions or how they would respond to difficulties or any....crap....what's that word?

It gets in the way of stuff and it's annoying....this is embarrassing. 

Me when I try to be all professional. 

*cue jeopardy music*

Okay I've spent about five minutes trying to remember what word I'm trying-

OBSTACLES

Any obstacles. 

Don't worry guys I got this. 

ANYWAY. Try to analyze any OBSTACLES your character may encounter or any weaknesses of their characters.

Another assignment we had was a research paper.

Facts and real life accounts make your novel more realistic,

So knowing I would eventually turn my script into a novel, I poured over pages and pages of statistics and facts and more statistics.  

The final thing I would like to talk about is editing. Probably one of the most stressful things in class (beside the insanely short deadlines) was editing one another's scripts. Although incredibly helpful, I was even more scared about my classmates reading my own script. 

In class. 

In front of everyone. 

This gave me a lot of anxiety, I was terrified, embarrassed, and overall just didn't want to even go to class for that day. 

Although I didn't want to go, I went. Hearing my classmates offer and receive constructive criticism helped me realize that....everyone was in pretty much the same situation as I was. 

Although it may not have been my favourite class, I truly learned so much and grew significantly as a novel writer.  

I learned many techniques to learn how to truly go in depth into my novel and plan better with my writing. 

So thank you so much, screenwriting class.

~The Whimsical Writer
Please let me know if there is anything you would like me to talk about in anything of the realm of writing. Happy typing!

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