Welcome!!!

Today is officially the last session of my Screenwriting class. Although I am happy to have my Friday evenings back again, I am somewhat sad.  I met some pretty amazing writings as well as an extraordinary instructor over these last nine weeks.  My goal coming into the class was to learn the basics of writing a screenplay.  I have learned so much more.  Our first assignment was to write the premise or theme of our story.  Honestly, I had no clue what I was going to write about.  I thought about a dream that I had a few months ago and kind of turned that into a story.  I didn't realize that by attempting to uncover the premise of my work of fiction I would also be uncovering some underlined truths in my own life.

This blog is called "Surviving the Disturbance" after the seven plot points presented by my instructor.  He divides the three Act play into: The Balance, The Disturbance, The Plan, The Obstacles, The Crisis, The Climax, and finally The New Balance. The Disturbance happens earlier on in the play (around page 25 or so). While writing my story I was extremely confident in my Balance.  I simply showed how my central character lived her life.  The trouble started around page 21 or 22 when it was almost time for "something to happen." I thought of so many scenarios that would cause a break in my central character's daily routine, however, nothing was good enough.  "If I could just make something happen..." I thought to myself "then perhaps my character can achieve her goal and the overall premise could be revealed."

As writers we can be viewed as our worst critics.  We write and write and then delete and sometimes even burn our work because the little voice in our heads tells us that what we've written is crap.  "Sometimes you have to write a lot of useless information in order to get to the creative story inside of you."

Surviving the Disturbance of the story is only the beginning and actually its the easy part.  The remaining plot points are really the meat of the story. I plan to write through the fear.  I haven't a clue where this journey is going to take me, but I'm all packed for the trip!

You should join me!

Happy Writing!!!