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Story Trick: Foreshadowing and Payoff in The Prestige
If you by any chance would be looking for the proudest person in Copenhagen at the moment, look no further, because here I am.
I just uploaded my latest1 version of my feature length screenplay Downfall to the wonderful website TriggerStreet.com2.
It has really been a learning experience to write this screenplay. I loved the month of April when I was witting the script as part of the Script Frenzy event, but was so exhausted afterward that I had to leave it alone for some weeks before looking at it again.
And when I finally did, I found a screenplay in need of some serious rewriting. And that is what I’ve spent most of my free time doing for the past months.
The structure of the story is somewhat unchanged, but the pacing, the dialogue, the descriptions have all been changed, corrected or rewritten completely.
Even some of the main characters where merged into one to keep the entourage down to a minimum.
So now, all I have to do is wait for the hungry review vultures of TriggerStreet.com to rip it to pieces and tell me why and where I need to revise the script.
But right now I’m happy as a lark and above proud. Very proud.
You want to write a story? Fine. Put away your dictionary, your encyclopedias, your World Almanac, and your thesaurus. Better yet, throw your thesaurus into the wastebasket. The only things creepier than a thesaurus are those little paperbacks college students too lazy to read the assigned novels buy around exam time. Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule. You think you might have misspelled a word? O.K., so here is your choice: either look it up in the dictionary, thereby making sure you have it right – and breaking your train of thought and the writer’s trance in the bargain – or just spell it phonetically and correct it later. Why not? Did you think it was going to go somewhere? And if you need to know the largest city in Brazil and you find you don’t have it in your head, why not write in Miami, or Cleveland? You can check it … but later. When you sit down to write, write. Don’t do anything else except go to the bathroom, and only do that if it absolutely cannot be put off.
[via Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully - in Ten Minutes, by Stephen King]
Make a specific free-write screenplay. Come up with the most creative, dull, boring, or eccentric title for a Screenplay, then, everyday when you start to write, do a freewriting exercise on that Screenplay. Not only will it let you free your thoughts to the task at hand, it usually eliminates those two or three pages of ‘warm-up’ that can happen
[via John August’s wiki.
This new installment in the Story Trick series1 is not even written by me.
For some time I’ve been reading up on Joseph Campell and his Monomyth theory and how it could be applied to modern storytelling. Christopher Vogler2 has written an excellent introduction on how to apply it to screenwriting.
Now David Anaxagoras has written a really good article about one of the stages of the monomyth, Refusing the Call.
There is no need for me to write about this when David has already written such a good and explanatory article. Be sure to check out some his other articles on his newly launched website. It’s all great stuff.
This is what you get from running Raiders of the Lost Ark screenplay through IBM’s Many Eyes and using the 2-words tag visualization.
And the same screenplay run through Wordle (with the word Indy taken out)
Is it really a love story?
