The 15 Minute Movie Method

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“Snoop”, a Book About Defining Personality By Possessions

When describing characters, it’s common to describe a character’s appearance such as their face, hair color, or clothes. However, this only creates a superficial image of a character. To dig deeper, read “Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You” by Sam Gosling.

The basic idea behind “Snoop” is that you can determine a person’s personality by studying what they own and how they express themselves. For example, many people decorate their desks with items that provide comfort such as framed pictures of loved ones, stuffed animals, or posters. A person’s possessions are a way they can control their environment.

Nobody will decorate their desk with items they can’t stand. Instead, people reveal their personality by what they enjoy. Thus a desk decorated with Hello, Kitty memorabilia will belong to a completely different person than someone who decorates their desk with pictures from horror movies.

You can even look at someone’s music collection (playlist or CD collection) to determine what type of music they listen to that helps moderate their behavior. Someone who listens to heavy metal will be a different person than someone who enjoys classical music.

So when describing characters, go beyond the stereotypes of appearances and dig deeper into what a person might own and take with them to control their environment. Someone who drives a sports car will be different than someone who drives a beat-up clunker.

Then shatter expectations to create unique juxtapositions. For example, someone who drives a clunker might seem like a poor person who enjoys working on cars, but what if a character drives a clunker, yet dresses in fine European suits and polished shoes? This contradiction between their clothes and their car defines a distinct character, and that’s the kind of visual image your screenplay needs to describe.

Pick a well-dressed women with tasteful clothes and makeup, yet imagine her bedroom filled with teddy bears and valentines. This contrast hints that such a woman puts on a serious face at work to others while revealing her true playfulness at home in the privacy of her own bedroom.

These types of details is what the book “Snoop” can help you learn about. By observing people, you can turn the tiniest detail into something memorable. If a man still wears his fraternity ring, what does that say about him compared to another man who sports tattoos and body piercings all over his face?

The point is that you want to pick out specific details that intrigue a reader and paint a distinct and memorable character. Look for unique details and then contradict them. That can help make any character more memorable and interesting.

Consider reading “Snoop” to learn more about how our possessions reveal our personality. Once you understand how your own possessions define you, you can get a better idea how possessions define other people as well.

Now by subtly describing the stuff your characters own that stand out, you can paint a far more descriptive image than just focusing on looks alone.

“The 15-Minute Movie Method” Updated for 2023

For those who have been following this blog, most of the information in the latest edition of “The 15-Minute Movie Method” can be found here for free. The book simply collects and organizes information to make it easier to read. The latest edition mostly corrects typos and errors so it’s not necessary to purchase if you already have a recent copy.

For anyone who has not purchased the book yet, it’s available as both a Kindle ebook and a printed paperback so you can purchase whichever version you prefer. The ebook version has been redesigned with a special ebook creation program to make it appear best within digital ebook readers.

The essence of the book is that you should always plan yours tory before you rush out and write it. Novices too often try to write and make up their story as they go along, which practically guarantees a complete mess. It’s far better to plan ahead and once you have a rough idea where your story is going, then start writing.

As you write, you may find your story going in another direction, but having a plan from the start will keep you from going off on a complete tangent and wasting time writing pages that will ultimately be thrown away.

Spending a lot of time writing a screenplay either means you’re refining it or you’re trying to figure out what your story is about. If you’re writing and rewriting just to figure out your story, you’re wasting your time. Never feel that just because you rewrote something a dozen times that you’ve somehow made it better. You may have simply rewrote it a dozen times where all dozen versions are equally flawed.

Before writing, describe your story in an outline with the main plot points, or write a treatment that describes what happens in paragraph form. This will be a far easier way to plot your story because it’s easy to delete or rearrange a few sentences or paragraphs. It’s not easy or fun to delete or rearrange dozens of pages that you’ve already written in your screenplay.

Ultimately, there’s a fast way to write a screenplay and there’s a slow way. The slow way involves charging ahead and writing over and over again until you figure out what story you want to tell. The fast way is to plan ahead and then start writing once you know what story you want to tell. Which option do you want?

“Writing Scenes For Screenplays” Now Available

Everyone can come up with a great idea for a story. That’s easy. The hard part is turning any idea into a great story. The answer lies in making every moment count. From start to finish, every scene must entice, captivate, and seduce the audience. To do that, it all boils down to writing great scenes one after another.

A scene acts as the basic building block of story-telling. Like a chain that’s only as strong as its weakest link, so is a story only as strong as its weakest scene. Tell just one weak scene and your entire story risks falling apart. Watch great movies like “Star Wars,” “Casablanca,” “The Shawshank Redemption,” and “Titanic” and there isn’t a single scene that distracts from the story. Instead, each scene pulls you along from start to finish, holding your attention and sending you on an emotional roller coaster. By the end of the movie, you may not even realize how many scenes you’ve seen. All you know is that you’ve experienced an emotional rush without even realizing how much time has gone by.

To write a great scene, you need to understand the basic structure of how a scene works. Every scene must tell a mini-story that introduces a problem to grab our attention and conflict between two characters who are each trying to achieve a goal. During this conflict, problems arise until the scene ends with one character getting (or not getting) their original goal.

Although scenes act like mini-stories, they must link with other scenes. That means each scene needs to end with a cliffhanger that makes us want to know what happens, and that links to the next scene. More importantly, each scene setups crucial information that pays off in later scenes. The combination of cliffhangers and setups/payoffs keeps multiple scenes connected to each other to tell a strongly structured story.

Writing a scene involves knowing how to use description, how to write action, and how to write dialogue. Once you know how to write one compelling scene, you can write multiple compelling scenes to tell a captivating story. Knowing how to write a scene for a screenplay is a skill that’s often overlooked, but it’s crucial to master to tell your story the best you can.

“Writing Scenes for Screenplays” covers these topics:

Introduction

How to Use This Book

Part I – Understanding Scenes

Chapter 1 – The Purpose of Every Scene

Chapter 2 – Shaping Scenes with the Initial Problem

Chapter 3 – The Theme

Chapter 4 – Problems Move the Story Forward

Chapter 5 – Dilemmas Must constantly Challenge the Hero

Chapter 6 – Outlining the Emotional Change

Chapter 7 – The Main Characters

Chapter 8 – Defining All the Subplots

Chapter 9 – Foundation Scenes in a Story

Chapter 10 – Paired Scenes – The Beginning and the End

Chapter 11 – Paired Scenes – The False Victory and the Climax

Part II – Writing Your Own Scenes

Chapter 12 – Writing a Scene

Chapter 13 – The Structure of a Scene

Chapter 14 – The Elements of a Scene

Chapter 15 – Action, Dialogue, and Setting

Chapter 16 – Starting the Story

Chapter 17 – Introducing the Symbol of Hope

Chapter 18 – The Symbol of Hope Scenes

Chapter 19 – The First Half of the Hero’s Story

Chapter 20 – The Second Half of the Hero’s Story

Chapter 21 – The Physical Problem

Chapter 22 – The Emotional Problem

Part III – Structure Your Scenes

Chapter 23 – Act I Scenes

Chapter 24 – Act IIa Scenes

Chapter 25 – Act IIb Scenes

Chapter 26 – Act III Scenes

Chapter 27 – A New Way to Write

Chapter 28 – Where To Go From Here

Appendix – Major Scenes in Every Story

Until you learn how to write a compelling scene, you will never be able to write a compelling story of any kind. Scene writing is a crucial skill that every screenwriter must master and this book will show you how to do it.

How to Create Stronger Characters (Without Writing Lots of Biography)

There’s an excellent story writing book called “27 Essential Principles of Story” by Daniel Joshua Rubin. One useful principle for developing characters is to identify the way they think, what they believe, and who they are at the core.

The standard way to develop characters is to write a biography about them such as where they went to school, what major traumatic incident may have shaped their lives, what career they might have, and so on. While creating a biography on each character can help you get a better idea who they are, it can also waste time creating irrelevant information that serves no purpose to your story.

After all, knowing that your character played volleyball in high school probably won’t help your story much unless your story has some relation to volleyball or sports in general.

Instead of wasting time making up details that may largely be irrelevant, “27 Essential Principles of Story” suggests starting with four ideas:

  • What does the character look like
  • How does the character think
  • What does the character value and believe
  • Who is the character under pressure

Describing a character by appearance is easy, but crucial because a character’s appearance helps define who they are. For example, having a blond woman in a bikini as a nuclear scientist might not make sense at first, but this physical appearance means the woman is not only attractive, but smart as well, which likely made her tough to put up with people only attracted to her looks. Thus a character’s appearance, whatever it may be, can go a long way towards shaping who they are.

That goes into how the character thinks. When characters face a problem, how do they try to solve it? By cheating? By analyzing it like a puzzle or riddle? By smashing into it using brute force? The way characters react to problems and try to solve them can shape who they are.

Digging deeper, what do characters value and believe? Someone who tries to cheat when faced with a problem might think that they’re not good enough to succeed otherwise, or they might think that everyone cheats so they should too. What characters believe goes much further in defining how they react to anything.

Finally, what type of person is your character under pressure? Are they as tough as they appear? Are they stronger? Weaker? Cowardly?

So instead of burying yourself with mounds of trivial about each character, focus more on how they think, what they believe, and who they really are on the inside. Once you know this, then you’ll have a far better idea how to write a scene with this character.

What’s more important in defining a character in a screenplay? The fact that they played volleyball at the University of Minnesota or the fact that they believe everyone cheats so they can too?

When you wean yourself away from irrelevant and overwhelming details by writing biographies for each character, but focus on the driving forces of each character, you’ll find it’s far easier to write great scenes for your screenplay with characters who feel real, consistent, and alive.

Create a Story That Solves Three Problems at the Same Time

In every story, there are three problems the story can solve:

  • External problems
  • Internal problems
  • Philosophical problems

Bad stories simply focus on external problems such as showing the hero mowing down an army of bad guys with a machine gun. There’s little more to care about than gunfire, explosions, and special effects, but the action itself means little. That’s why solving an external problem alone can never tell a complete story.

Internal problems involve inner conflict within the hero, often based on problems from the hero’s past. Watching a hero solve an internal problem makes the story more interesting because instead of just seeing the hero overcome physical obstacles (external problems), we can see the hero also overcoming internal problems that allow the hero to become a better and stronger person.

However, great stories also solve a philosophical problem that gives the story meaning. Because of this additional meaning that explains some aspect of life, the story resonates far more strongly in our minds.

Let’s start with a story that only solves external problems such as “Jaws: The Revenge.” The external problem is simply to kill a great white shark. Once this great white shark is killed, that’s the end of the story and that’s all audiences will remember. Boring.

Now consider a story that solves all three problems such as “The Shawshank Redemption.” The external problem is the hero trying to regain his freedom. The internal problem is that the hero must constantly hold on to hope while struggling with despair being locked in a prison with no way out. What makes the hero’s plight even worse is that he’s innocent.

Finally, “The Shawshank Redemption” provides us a clue for how to live life by telling us never to give up hope. When we see the hero embrace his friend on the beach at the end of the story, we finally understand the importance of never giving up hope.

Another movie that embraces all three problems is “Rocky.” The external problem is that Rocky gets a chance to fight the heavyweight champion of the world. The internal problem is that Rocky wants to prove to the world that he’s not a bum, but he’s also afraid that he might be. The philosophical problem that the story tells us is to never give up on our dreams.

Eliminate the internal and philosophical problems and your story is weak. Add in an internal problem and your story is stronger. Add in a philosophical message and your story will be memorable.

This idea of defining a story using external, internal, and philosophical problems came from Donald Miller’s book “Building a Story Brand,” which uses storytelling techniques to market a business. Although the book focuses on marketing, it’s actually an excellent book about storytelling techniques in general.

So define the three types of problems your story will present: an external problem, an internal problem, and a philosophical problem. By defining what these will be in your story, you can create a fully fleshed out story that will resonate with audiences and make your story stand out.

The 15-Minute Movie Method (Kindle) Book Now Available!

One common mistake screenwriters make is that they start writing as soon as they have an idea. The trouble is that even the best idea will go nowhere if it’s poorly written. Poorly written screenplays typically fail to tell a compelling and intriguing story from start to finish.

There are two ways writers typically tell stories. Some writers like to start writing and through the process of writing, they discover their characters, their plot, and their theme. While this can work, it can take a tremendous amount of time and the end result is throwing away large parts of your writing that no longer fit your story.

The other way to write a story is to plan ahead. Just as you wouldn’t just hop in your car and drive in any direction you wanted in hopes of taking a vacation in Italy when you live in New York, so you should also plan your story in advance so you know what you want to write before you start writing.

That’s what the 15-Minute Movie Method book is all about. This completely revised edition focuses on planning and structuring your story based on your theme, which is what your story is about. Once you know your theme, you automatically know how your story will end because you’ll know what type of person your hero needs to be in the beginning and end.

For example, the movie “Liar Liar” is about a lawyer who consistently lies to get what he wants. Then his son makes a wish that forces him to tell the truth, so the theme of the story might be “Honesty is the best policy.”

That theme immediately tells us that the hero must start the story as a compulsive liar, but by the end, he must learn to tell the truth.

Just this simple use of the theme to define your hero can keep you from going off on tangents with characters who don’t support your theme.

In “Witness,” a cop is forced to hide in an Amish community. This story’s theme might be “Non-violence is a valid way to solve problems.” Thus the hero in the beginning thinks that violence is the way to solve problems, but by the end he learns that non-violence is another way to solve problems as well.

Once you know who your hero is, you automatically know who your villain is because your villain is the evil version of your hero and embraces the negative aspect of your story theme. In “Witness,” the theme is that non-violence is a way to solve problems, that means the villain believes violence is the only way to solve problems.

Plotting a story is easy when you use your theme as a guideline. In every scene, your hero must be torn between the negative aspect of the theme and the positive aspect of the theme. In “Witness,” the hero is constantly torn between accepting non-violence or falling back on his violent tendencies to solve problems.

Once you know your theme, you know your hero, you know the conflict in every scene, you know your villain, and you also know your mentor (who must teach the hero the theme), and you also know your ally who helps the hero.

A mentor represents the theme while an ally lets the hero see themselves. By helping an ally, the hero helps themselves and their ally while demonstrating the theme once more. Allies are just as flawed as the hero so they need to help each other embrace the story theme.

Can you see how everything is connected by the theme? If you simply write in all directions with no plan whatsoever, you risk creating a plot and characters who have little or nothing to do with your theme. That creates a disjointed, unsatisfying story.

However, if you write a story where every element focuses on your theme, you’l create a focused, unified story, and those types of stories are what great movies and novels are all about.

Just look at your favorite movies and ask yourself if every element works together or not. That’s the secret to structuring any story by using your theme as a guideline to shape the entire story from start to finish.

The latest edition of “The 15-Minute Movie Method” explains all this and more. Of course you can get all this information for free on my blog, but the book presents much of this blog information in a more organized, structured format.

Planning ahead is the key to spending less time being lost and frustrated, and more time being productive when you’re actually writing. With “The 15-Minute Movie Method” book, you can learn to identify the key elements of story telling to write the story you want to tell faster and easier than before.

(Kindle edition now available. Paperback version coming soon.)

Great Books to Learn More About Storytelling

I once heard that if you read five books on any topic, you’ll know more about that topic than the vast majority of the public. Since it’s not always possible to learn directly from someone more advanced than you, the next best option is to read books.

At the very least, books can reinforce what you already know and provide different examples and perspective to help you further understand a particular idea. Since everyone needs to work on different aspects of their writing, one book may be perfect for you right now while another book may not.

In many cases, you’ll learn at least one useful bit of information from a book that you didn’t know before. In “Save the Cat! Writes for TV”, the biggest idea is that writing for movies and writing for television are two different stories. When you write a movie, you want a conclusive ending with a definite change in the hero from beginning to end.

Yet when you write for TV, you’re essentially creating a situation where the hero and the other major characters do not change. If they do change, they do so slowly over the course of several episodes or seasons. Think of a TV series as trapping characters in a hell that never changes and that’s essentially the difference when writing for TV.

“The Nutshell Technique” focuses on tying your story closely with the hero’s emotional need. The prime example the book gives is “Tootsie” where the hero needs to learn how to treat women better and thus he’s forced to disguise himself as a woman and see first-hand how women are treated. This story wouldn’t be the same if the hero had to disguise himself as a fat man.

The main idea I got from “The Nutshell Technique” is that when the hero leaves his/her old world and enters a new world, they eventually achieve their goal (False Victory) but there’s a catch. In “Die Hard,” John McClane finally notifies the authorities about the terrorists. The catch is that he’s still trapped and they’re still holding his wife hostage.

In “Tootsie,” the hero finally gets an acting job, but the catch is that he has to disguise himself as a woman. In “Titanic,” Rose finally finds someone to truly love, but the catch is that she’s on a doomed ocean liner. In “The Little Mermaid,” Ariel finally gets to meet the prince but the catch is that she cannot speak or sing.

When your hero leaves Act I and enters a new word in Act IIa, look for the catch that keeps the hero from having everything. The stronger the catch, the stronger the motivation of the hero to resolve this problem and that leads the hero eventually to Act III.

Many aspiring screenwriters focus on screenplays, yet there’s a whole new market in writing stories for video games. While movies are linear stories, video games are non-linear stories, so they have different challenges. To learn more about video game storytelling, read “Video Game Storytelling.”

One crucial idea from this book is to challenge your hero in Act IIb. In Act I, your hero is behaving one way and then in Act IIa, the hero overcomes minor obstacles to achieve success. However, Act IIb is where the hero’s life starts falling apart and that’s what you need to emphasize.

In “Star Wars,” Luke was a timid farm boy in Act I. However in Act IIb, he’s taken the initiative to rescue Princess Leia and winds up trapped in a garbage compact where he’s nearly killed.

In “Die Hard,” John McClane is a tough cop in Act I. However in Act IIb, he’s nearly killed by the FBI and the terrorists until he’s seriously wounded by stepping on glass.

In “Legally Blonde,” Elle is a smart blonde in Act I. However in Act IIb, she’s treated like a sex object by her law professor. This forces Elle to really think about who she wants to be: a dumb blonde sex object or a strong woman?

Notice that Act IIb is all about taking the hero’s greatest fear in Act I and forcing him/her to deal with it in Act IIb? That’s what I learned from “Video Game Storytelling” although you may learn something completely different.

Perhaps the most important book is “You’re Going to Need a Bigger Story.” The main idea behind this book is to create not just a story, but a story world. In other words, create a franchise that can support multiple stories. If you pitch a single story, that might be profitable like “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Yet if you pitch a story world/universe, you’re really pitching a franchise that can make far more money in sequels, merchandise, and TV shows. Think of the vast difference between “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” compared to “Star Wars.”

“Star Wars” created an entire world that wasn’t dependent on just a single story. Instead, George Lucas was able to write multiple stories (including the really bad prequels). Think of the Harry Potter series, the Hunger Games series, or the Jurassic Park series. They all tell stories within the same story world, but they can mine multiple stories out of that story world compared to just creating a single story.

So if you really want to shoot for the moon, don’t create a story. Create a story world, and “You’re Going to Need a Bigger Story” can teach you how to do it.

Most people likely have their own favorite books, but the key is to keep learning and keep reading. Sometimes a single book can just reinforce your ideas, but sometimes it can give you one idea you never had before. In rare cases, it can give you a whole new way of looking at writing (“You’re Going to Need a Bigger Story”).

The best way to improve as a screenwriter is to write. The second best way is to keep learning from books. Never stop learning because you can always learn something new.

Three Story Plots

When athletes train, they off cross-train. That means they perform exercises that may not be directly related to their sport but can improve their performance anyway. For example, boxers may jog to build stamina, football players may study wrestling to learn how to take someone down, and cyclists may swim to strengthen their arm and leg muscles.

Writing is no different. Besides studying screenplay writing books, screenwriters should also study non-writing books to get ideas. One interesting book is “Made to Stick,” which focuses on studying why certain ideas are more memorable than others.

The examples given in “Made to Stick” focus mostly on business situations such as the popular “Where’s the beef?” commercial by Wendy’s or Subway’s former spokesman, Jared, who lost a huge amount of weight just by eating Subway sandwiches (and later got arrested for child pornography).

One idea that “Made to Stick” makes is that if you want people to remember your ideas, tell a story. The book describes three types of stories:

  • Challenge plots
  • Connection plots
  • Creativity plots

The main idea of a challenge plot is to pit an underdog against a heavily-favored champion. This is the plot of nearly all sports stories such as “Rocky” or “Seabiscuit.” When the hero is an underdog, we can’t help but want to root for the hero to win.

Connection plots are different because they focus on bringing people together from different groups. This can be racial groups such as in “Green Book” where a white man drives a black musician around the Deep South and learns to become more understanding about blacks, or it can be the gap between rich and poor such as in “Crazy Rich Asians” where a middle class woman wins over the rich mother of her boyfriend. Connection plots are usually inspiring and emotionally moving because the hero is still an underdog partly because a social gap blocks the hero’s path to success.

Creativity plots are stories about people doing clever, unusual actions to achieve a goal. Think of “The Sting,” “The Shawshank Redemption,” or “Ocean’s 11.” The more interesting and unique the hero’s actions, the more likely that story will stick in people’s minds.

So when writing your own screenplay, make sure your story follows at least one of these plots. If your hero is not an underdog (the most basic story plot of all), then your story will be much harder to get people to root for the hero.

Connecting a social gap isn’t always necessary but can further strengthen your story. “Aladdin” is not only about an underdog peasant boy, but an underdog peasant boy trying to win the hand of a princess (major social barrier). Adding a social gap of some kind makes the hero’s success much more rewarding.

Creativity is necessary to keep your story from being predictable and boring. In “Rocky,” we know he’s either going to win or lose. However, the outcome is more surprising. Rocky loses, but wins the hearts of the world for his persistence and determination, and that’s something unexpected that makes “Rocky” more enjoyable.

So if your story can include a challenge, connection, and creativity plot all together, you’ll likely write a better screenplay than if your story only includes one (or none) of those plots.

“The Hunger Games” vs. “Divergent”

When “The Hunger Games” became a hit movie, Hollywood rushed multiple young adult (YA) movies into production based on best-selling YA novels. Unfortunately, “The Hunger Games” is an exception to the YA genre, which is why it succeeded so well as a movie.

Read “The Hunger Games” and you’ll notice the following:

  • The novel tells a complete story where all the villains lose in the end and the hero returns triumphantly home.
  • The novel introduces characters and situations early and the rest of the story shows us what happens to those characters by the end of the story.

Now read “Divergent,” which was a YA novel turned into a movie series that tried to mimic the success of “The Hunger Games.” In “Divergent,” you’ll notice the following:

  • The novel does not tell a complete story because the villain is never fully defeated in the end and the story ends with no sense of finality or conclusion for the hero.
  • The novel keeps introducing new characters and situations and by the end of the story, we have no idea what happens to most minor characters.

There’s a reason why “The Hunger Games” worked as a movie and “Divergent” did not. It’s hard to tell an incomplete story as a movie. Imagine “Rocky” where “Rocky” never fights or “Star Wars” where we never see if Luke destroys the Death Star. Stories must be complete to be satisfying, but YA novels favor incomplete stories to encourage readers to buy and read the next book in the series.

Novels also tend to be loosely structured compared to screenplays. In a screenplay, Act I sets up the story and the remaining Acts show what happens. So in “The Hunger Games”, Act I introduces the characters and the idea of a battle to the death. Then the rest of the story is about the characters we’ve met fighting in a battle to the death.

In most YA novels (with the exception of “The Hunger Games”), the entire story keeps introducing new information, making the entire story one long exposition that suddenly ends without any sense of resolution.

In “Divergent”, Act I introduces characters and the idea of factions that rule society. Then the remaining Acts keep introducing new characters and situations for the hero to face.

By the end of “The Hunger Games,” the hero has survived and returned home, which creates a sense of completion. By the end of “Divergent,” the hero is still on the run because the villain has not been defeated.

“The Hunger Games” sequels are far weaker than the original book, but the original book could stand alone without its sequels. “Divergent” cannot stand alone without its sequels, which means it’s a far weaker story as a result.

So the lesson is clear. Hollywood only tells incomplete stories when they closely follow the incomplete stories of a YA novel. If you’re trying to write an original screenplay, do not mimic the structure of a YA novel.

You cannot tell an incomplete story and you cannot keep introducing new characters and situations as the story progresses. You must tell a complete story and by the end of Act I, we should know what the story is about so we can constantly see the hero struggling to achieve a clearly defined goal introduced in Act I.

Why YA novels tell incomplete stories (and get published) while constantly introducing new characters with no clearly defined goal by the end of Act I is a mystery. YA novels offers unique situations such as dystopian futures, but that alone can never sustain an entire story. Just watch the “Divergent” movie series to see movies that steady lose focus and direction as each succeeding sequel fails to tell a compelling, complete story in the process.

Ways to Start a Story

If you want to make your stories more emotionally engaging, there’s an excellent book by David Freeman called “Creating Emotion in Games.” While the book focuses on techniques for adding emotional engagement to video games, the principles apply to screenwriting as well.

One technique is to begin with a fake out scene, which appears to be what the story is about but isn’t. “Passenger 57” does this by advertising itself as a thriller where the hero must stop a hijacker, so the opening scene shows the hero on an airplane, trying to stop a hijacker. As it turns out, the hero is actually in a training session and showing others how to deal with a hijacker on an airplane.

A far more common opening method is to create a mystery that hints about the danger without explaining what’s going on. This occurs in “Ghostbusters” where a librarian is in a library where supernatural occurrences are happening around her. The scene ends when the librarian sees the ghost and is about to scream, leaving us with a mystery that will eventually be solved.

Another type of opening introduces us to a unique character right away. This method is most often used in James Bond movies that begin with a fight scene such as a battle on top of a train in “Skyfall” or a chase scene among skiers in “The Spy Who Loved Me.”

Yet another type of opening is to show the audience a unique world that’s far different from the ordinary world. “Star Wars” does this by putting us in the middle of a battle between starships while “Pulp Fiction” does this by putting us in the ordinary world of a coffee shop, but where a couple is about to rob it.

So when thinking about your opening scene, think about the following techniques:

  • A fake out scene
  • A mystery
  • An introduction to a unique character
  • A glimpse into an unusual world

The book “Creating Emotional in Games” is packed with tips for making stories more emotionally engaging so it’s worth reading or owning this book if you can. If the author can make video games more emotionally engaging, the same techniques can also make screenplays more engaging emotionally as well.

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