Welcome to the fourth of our Creative Challenges. We’re focusing on writing about identities in our first week of Creative Challenges: WriteMovies’ 100-Day Creative Challenge 4 gets you exploring the gap between people’s true identities, and how others perceive them to be.
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 whose real identity is very different from the identity that other people think they have.
- 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 “100DayCC4”. 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 #100DayCC4 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:
Secrets, lies and betrayals… spies and tricksters… mistaken identities and comedies of errors…! So much drama and comedy are created simply by the gap between what people perceive someone to be, and the truth. We can’t get enough of spy stories, crime dramas and conspiracy thrillers for example – because very ordinary-seeming people and situations can carry huge suspense and hidden surprises in those types of story. This Challenge gets you thinking about what kind of perception-gaps fascinate you, and what you’ve got to say about them. Look back when you’re finished and see if your description of your character reveals this gap in a blunt, ‘on the nose’ kind of way, or if it’s presented subtly. As you redraft and refine a piece like this, you should probably find yourself making your writing more subtle, and leaving it to your audience to recognize the gaps and conflicts for themselves. That is a fundamentally more engaging style of writing than just hitting us with something you want us to know, as if you’re afraid we won’t be smart enough to spot it for ourselves. But it’s VERY typical for first drafts to be too on-the-nose, so don’t beat yourself up about it if that’s what you’ve done here! The nugget of truth about what fascinates you about this perception-gap, is the positive to take away from this activity, and could be very productive for inspiring more writing in the future.
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!