A one-day course designed to sharpen your imaginative skills when writing which can be tailored for your team.
Introduction
Ernest Hemingway wrote what is considered to be the shortest complete six word short-story every told:
‘For sale: Baby shoes. Never used.’
In this one-day workshop, we will learn how language is so powerful that one word is always better than six. Intensively hands-on, participants will write all day, learning by doing.
Workshop Outline
LESS IS MORE
Exercise in which we use visualisation to write a 25-word poem about an early childhood experience. This is re-written as six lines of dialogue containing no more than ten words. Participants learn how little it takes to write a self-contained incident.
WRITING FROM CHARACTER
Exercise in which we learn how ‘character’ is created by scriptwriters. Using six lines of dialogue we write comic characters which can be instantly recognised. Understanding how this works is especially good for creatives working in animation or promo producers and commercials teams who need to create instantly-recognisable characters. 'Less is More' is especially true in characterisation.
Moving to an improvisation session, we use single words to denote people. This will illustrate how monosyllabic dialogue can still reveal a vast amount about character.
USING HUMOUR
We practise writing jokes using 10 joke formats. Gag writing is some of the cleverest writing around – we learn some tricks of the trade to help to up the humour in our writing. One image is worth a thousand words.
STORY STRUCTURE
Drama has its own narrative world - which can be learned then applied to many other forms of writing. We brainstorm some of our own plots using goals, arcs and genres in order to learn how to summarise and transform a two-hour feature into a three-line pitch.
EMOTIONAL UNDERSCORING
Clever writing is useless without emotional engagement. How do you make your audience feel: feel terrified, feel like crying, feel desire, want to laugh, want to know the truth? We spend time doing exercises to score a ‘10’ on the emotional scale.
HOW TO BRAINSTORM
In a series of fun exercises we use a variety of techniques to come up with wild ideas for movie trailers. Then we write spoof scripts; and learn to cut, cut, cut.
Further details
Time: 10am to 5pm
Price: £1,500 one day course
Tutor: Fenella Greenfield
Further details: fenella.greenfield@euroscript.co.uk
