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Welcome to the twenty-first of our Creative Challenges. WriteMovies’ 100-Day Creative Challenge 21 is about ways producers can reduce the risks of their productions.

Guidance: For the next 20 minutes, use whatever method you like – thoughts and ideas, mind maps, diagrams or sketches, a sample of script, prose, poetry – as you prepare a creative piece, about:

A really safe idea for a new project that producers could choose to make right now in order to make an easy profit from an existing audience.

  • As you work through this task, you might also consider how this activity relates to ways producers can reduce the risks of their productions.
  • Save or photograph your work as a document called “100DayCC21”. Then reflect on this experience and what it has taught you about you and your writing: what comes naturally to you, which aspects  were easy and difficult, and the subjects, angles and attitudes that you like to focus your writing on.
  • Share online if you like using the hashtag #100DayCC21 to compare to other people’s experiences and support each other, or submit to our Academy Lite if you’re a subscriber!

When you complete the Challenge – or if you get completely stuck – then look at the Feedback below!


Feedback:

There are many ways that studio and TV executives can reduce the risks, and the next Challenges will give you practice with many of them. If the ‘really safe, popular project’ you came up with isn’t one of these – then you may really be onto a winner! Make no mistake – writing for existing, ‘safe’ choices is no excuse to not be creative and write something amazing and impressive: lots of us were surprised how much we were impressed by the spate of reboots in the mid-2000s, like BATMAN BEGINS and CASINO ROYALE, which succeeded even though you knew their ending would just leave you wherever you normally expected to begin a story from those franchises!

It’s also worth considering whether you could confidently generate a spec script that could sell you as THE person to deliver a project that has already been greenlit, within a certain genre or niche. Our Elite Mentors Bobby Lee Darby and Nathan Brookes got into horror scriptwriting this way and regularly get invited to pitch to write films that have already been commissioned, resulting in them writing horror and action sequels and resultantly getting their own original script produced – find out more about them HERE.

General tips and feedback:

Many writers, naturally, don’t find it easy to be creative ‘on tap’ – especially for work that they didn’t set themselves. But to write professionally, you will usually need to meet deadlines and requirements, that can’t be put off, for briefs you didn’t choose for yourself: even if you’re ill or feeling down, you’ll usually have to just find a way through, and get the results that are needed, to the quality that’s necessary. So the WriteMovies Creative Challenges are designed to help you find ways around the crucial issues of ‘block’.

 

We do this by setting a (deceptively!) simple brief, and encouraging you to use a variety of methods, approaches and creative products in order to find ways around it, and generate some kind of outcomes that might be useful to you in the future. Whatever state your mind and mood are in – energetic or tired, stimulated or bored, motivated or disengaged, etc – there are different ‘modes’ of creative productivity which you can engage, to make the best of it: editing your work if you can’t write, making notes if you can’t generate script, etc. Try a mix of methods to make the most of activities such as the Creative Challenges, especially anytime you get stuck: just keep adding notes, sketches etc freely, you can decide later whether any of them are useful! Also note that the brief is to ‘prepare’ a creative work – not to actually make it straight away, before you feel ready to! But if you’ve come away from this with a passage of prose or script or even poetry, well done!

 

Hopefully this activity will have shown you the potential value of our Creative Challenges, and the benefits of making a routine to complete them, and persisting with it day by day to gradually improve all aspects of your writing and to develop solutions to ‘block’, that you will become more and more proficient with over time. We recommend that you commit to fulfilling the 100-Day Creative Challenges, sharing your outputs to gain the support and feedback of other writers working on the same activities, and if you’d like expert daily feedback from us on this and much more, additional material, subscribe to the WriteMovies Academy Lite now!

Go to the 100-Day Creative Challenge homepage HERE, to access further Challenges! Use our hashtag #100DayCC on your social media to discuss the Challenges more generally!

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