by Kimberly A. Cook (Twitter@ WarriorTales)
Over the holidays I spent a lot of time watching Hallmark Christmas movies while getting over a series of colds. After about 3,000 of those little gems, it was time for a change. Seems I’ve put myself on a tv diet. What we put in our head affects how our writer brains work and my imagination was sick and tired of bad news and grim times, including my favorite tv cop shows.
What to do? Movie-therapy!
http://youtu.be/P1coDNUdV74
We all have our favorite movies, but I have a special group I call Kim’s Classics. These are movies I pull out like old friends to come visit; I know we’re going to have a great time. The trailer for “The Hallelujah Trail” above is one of my go to movie picks. It’s got comedy, romance, military strategy, Brian Keith, drinking, miners and Irish teamsters, just to name a few things.
When I first read Syd Field’s “The Screenwriter’s Workbook,” he made the three act screenplay structure so clear and understandable. When I discovered how Chris Vogler took the twelve steps of the Hero’s Journey and put it together with the three act screenplay structure in “The Writer’s Journey; Mythic Structure For Storytellers and Screenwriters,” First Edition, page 18 – I felt I’d discovered the Ark of the Covenant! “Raiders of the Lost Ark” – gang. (Vogler is up to the Third Edition now, I own all of them.)
Using Syd and Chris’s combined structure outline is how I plot my fiction books. It makes plotting very simple for me. I’m one of those “give me the framework pantsers” and let me run with it type of writers, but only after years of writing too freely in all directions and then having to do major rewrites. Not a big fan of major rewrites – my inner journalist gets quite testy. This way I get the turning points and the Hero’s Journey events outlined and then I know where I start, end and avoid the mush in the middle.
The screenwriting classes I took helped me write better dialogue and even more with book structure. Now when I watch movies I look for the turning points and how the Hero’s Journey propels the movie along. See, learning by watching movies can be fun and educational. If you’re having issues with structure, I recommend reading those two books and maybe tattooing parts of them on your body; they’re that good.
Not every writing tool works for every writer, we have to find what works for us by “Trial and Error,” another Kim Classic movie. So dust off those DVDs and VHS tapes and study! Make a batch of popcorn and fire up the remote. What are your favorite classic movies?
I felt a certain justification when Syd Field used two of my go-to classics (Thelma & Louise and Terminator 2) in his book Four Screenplays. (:
I don’t know whether watching movies can make us better writers or not, but I do have a few classics, one of which is The Color Purple. It has so many themes and is such a powerful story! Plus, I can still recall some of the lines and scenes of the movie and am wondering about the creative minds who brought them (the movie and the book!) to life.
Need to add that one to my list! Thanks Marlajayne