Welcome to the thirty-sixth of our Creative Challenges. We’re focusing on key aspects of writing and storytelling – core elements that can always be found under the surface of every successful story in our eighth week of Creative Challenges: WriteMovies’ 100-Day Creative Challenge 36 is about the different aspects of storytelling that can be found in any successful story.
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 who thinks they know everything about what they’re doing – but is missing one vital aspect of it!
- As you work through this task, you might also consider how this activity relates to the different aspects of storytelling that can be found in any successful story.
- Save or photograph your work as a document called “100DayCC36”. 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 #100DayCC36 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:
For this Challenge you might think of someone who makes or cooks something, but leaves out some key component. Or an event plan that’s doomed to failure. Or someone who takes other people for granted, and doesn’t realize that they can’t succeed without the support, help or at least tolerance of others.
Whatever you’re writing or producing, we guarantee that ALL of the aspects of writing in the next Challenges will be important if it’s going to succeed. They’re there, whether you consciously plan them to be or not.
For each of them, consider how they relate to our watchlist of films and TV shows, and to any ideas you’re working on at the moment. A full list will be provided within a Worksheet shortly to help you apply them to your ideas.
If you don’t know how an aspect relates to any one of these projects, then you need to put extra focus on this aspect before continuing!
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!