Welcome to the third of our Creative Challenges. We’re focusing on writing about identities in our first week of Creative Challenges: WriteMovies’ 100-Day Creative Challenge 3 is designed to get you exploring what makes someone’s identity fascinating!
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:
Someone with a really interesting identity or role.
- As you work through this task, you might also consider how this activity relates to what interests audiences about certain characters.
- Save or photograph your work as a document called “100DayCC3”. 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 #100DayCC3 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:
Audiences are far more interested in interesting people than boring ones, for obvious reasons! But the things that might be interesting about someone’s personality often can’t be shown straight away. First, you usually have to instead provide the character with an identity that makes them seem interesting to us – or at least present the ‘ordinary’ identity they have in an interesting way (as, for example, AMERICAN BEAUTY, ONE HOUR PHOTO and THE NIGHT MANAGER do). Their character will be defined by the decisions and actions they make – but we have to know some context for them before those can be tested. So, this activity should have prompted you to think about what makes someone’s identity or role an interesting one – and what kind of interesting identities or roles you are more drawn to write about. Were you more tempted to write about someone of action (a leader, soldier etc) or someone more intellectual? Someone in regular society, or someone a bit more ‘special’? The choices you make in Creative Challenges like this can help to show you what your own ‘voice’ is, by showing you what you choose to focus on and what you don’t, and how you present those things.
Wider 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, 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!