Dougie Creative

Dougie Creative

Filmmaker, print maker, and waffle maker Sylvia Douglas.
Filmmaker, print maker, and waffle maker Sylvia Douglas.

Write A Screenplay Day One

June 1, 2020

I have revived a screenplay from a dusty corner of the attic of my brain and polished off a mere concept, a character that unintentionally wills the manifestation of ghosts around her.

Knowing that I have a lot of overtime banked hours and unused vacation days at work I spent the month of May preparing to take time off and write a screenplay in June (seeing as travel or seeing family is off the table for a while). Or at least start. I am a firm believer in setting goals but with a project as large as a feature film I have decided to learn as I go. I have never done this before. My goal isn’t necessarily a finished screenplay, a draft, or even a complete outline (but, of course, I will strive for these things) my tangible goal is that I work on it every single day this month. Realistic. Attainable.

I devoured several books on screenwriting and say what you will about trying to learn an art or a craft from a book, but, I found the process useful. From each of the sources I read I have Frankensteined together a document to guide me through the writing process. I cherry picked what resonated and move on from the rest.

The books on screenwriting/writing that I read:

  • The Hero With A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
  • Mythology by Edith Hamilton
  • Aesop’s Fables
  • Poetics by Aristotle
  • Creating Character Arcs by K. M. Weiland
  • Story by Robert McKee
  • Screenwriting by Syd Field
  • Save The Cat by Blake Snyder
  • Anatomy of Story by John Truby
  • 21 Century Screenplay by Linda Aronson
  • If You Want To Write by Brenda Ueland
  • Dan Harmon’s Story Circle
  • Routledge Film Guidebooks: Horror by Brigid Cherry

I have to whole hardheartedly agree that reading screenplays, watching movies, and dissecting them is the best teacher a writer can get.

The screenplays that I read:

  • Frankenstein by Garrett Fort & Francis Edwards Faragoh (1931)
  • Night of the Living Dead by George A. Romero (1968)
  • The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty (1972)
  • Jaws by Peter Benchley (1975)
  • Alien by Walter Hill and David Giler based on the story by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett (1979)
  • The Shining by Stanley Kubrick & Diane Johnson (1980)
  • The Thing by Bill Lancaster (1982)
  • 28 Days Later by Alex Garland (2002)
  • The Descent by Neil Marshall (2004)
  • Insidious by Leigh Whannell (2010)
  • The Babadook by Jennifer Kent (2011)
  • The Conjuring by the Hayes Brothers (2013)
  • The Autopsy of Jane Doe by Ian Goldberg & Richard Naing (2013)
  • It Follows by David Robert Mitchell (2014)
  • Get Out by Jordan Peele (2017)
  • The VVItch by Robert Eggers (2016)
  • Hereditary by Ari Aster (2018)
  • Us by Jordan Peele (2019)
  • Midsommer by Ari Aster (2019)

These are some online resources that I find endlessly interesting, useful, and helpful

To settle into the world of ghosts I read and listened to:

  • Collected Ghost Stories by M. R. James
  • Shorts Stories & The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
  • The Hounds of Death Collection by Agatha Christie
  • Mail manga series by Housui Yamazaki
  • Short Stories by H. P. Lovecraft
  • Darkworld by Zack Bagans (from the Ghost Adventures television show) & I watched episodes of Ghost Hunters. No regrets, but, I am grateful I am a fast reader.
  • Lore podcast
  • Spooked podcast

Truthfully, I am likely forgetting a handful of other media that I consumed. I have been voracious this past month.

Here’s to hewing creative time. I am grateful that I am able to do so. It’s going to be joyful, hard, and exciting work.

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