Extra credit post

This final screenwriting project has been my favorite so far. I wrote a scene from a move in which a bank hostage falls in love with her captor. It’s hard to make a gradual transition between the hostage being completely scared to falling in love. I selected a scene to write that’s a critical turning point in her story where she begins to empathies more with the captors than the hostages.

I love to write, but writing a fiction project is new to me. I’ve always struggled with coming up with new story ideas. Before this class, I would always try to come up with complicated plots with intertwining details and lots of twists. But for as much intellectual effort I put into the story, the scripts usually sucked. The stories were always dry, awkward, and unbelievable.

In this final project, I learned that the characters are far more important to a good story than coming up with a complicated plot. If I invent believable and strong characters, the story almost naturally writes itself. All I have to do is come up with a situation and ask myself what my characters would do in that situation. From now on, I will always start with characters rather than build the characters around the plot.