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Right-brain
scriptwriting Click here for other Masterclasses & booking info. From one of Europe's leading scriptwriters, script consultants and NLP practitioners. “This one-day workshop can turbo-charge your writing: what is the secret of writing great scripts? First, let me tell you what it’s not. It’s not the 3-act structure, it’s not the 9-act structure, it’s not the 22-step structure. It’s not an archetype or a hero’s journey. It’s not a matrix and it’s not a paradigm. It’s YOU. It’s the unique story only you can tell. You do need to figure out what is the appropriate structure, but the key is to let your story dictate the structure, not to let the structure dictate the story. Otherwise all stories start sounding the same… if you watch much television or see a lot of films or read a lot of books, you might suspect this is happening already! However, the real breakthroughs are works that reflect the true and unique voice of the author. Case in point: the Harry Potter books (and movies). In this age of computer games, who would have predicted that kids (and adults) around the world would go mad for an old-fashioned tale of wizards and a boy at a boarding school? J. K. Rowling believed in her vision, and now she’s on her way to becoming the first billionaire author in history and has turned millions of reluctant young readers into eager readers. Another case in point: My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which cost a few million dollars to make, and took in a quarter of a billion at the box office. The woman who wrote it first told her story as a stand-up routine, then wrote it as a script. More examples: Adaptation, Being John Malkovich, Memento, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and many other unconventional but successful films. How can you best get in touch with the unique stories inside you? How can you develop three-dimensional characters? How can you discover (rather than invent) the shape the story wants to be? How can you make your words come alive? And how can you motivate yourself to keep faith and keep on writing with integrity? I have found that Neuro Linguistic Programming and other right-brain creativity techniques transform the writing experience. I won’t claim it makes writing easy one hundred percent of the time, but I do know from my experience and that of many others that it does make the process easier, more enjoyable, more organic and more likely to result in a script that expresses your unique vision. For those of you who may not be familiar with NLP, it concerns itself with how we represent our experience in our own minds (neuro), in language (linguistic), and in behaviour (programming). So far, most NLP practitioners have concentrated on applying it to business, but it also has a lot to offer scriptwriters.
It will be an active workshop – you’ll find out how these tools
work and get an immediate opportunity to apply them to something you’ve already
started writing, or to a new idea, or (if you prefer) to exercises I will
suggest. Once you’ve mastered these techniques, you’ll want to use them for the
rest of your writing life. And you’ll receive a full set of back-up materials to
remind you of exactly how each technique works. Biography I always feel most comfortable with teachers who practice what they preach, so I want to give you a quick indication of how I’ve applied these tools myself. I created the animated series, Norman Normal (52 episodes produced, 13 more about to be produced), wrote the feature film, The Real Howard Spitz, starring Kelsey Grammer, and created two TV series that have aired on German television. I’ve also written a number of TV movies for U.S. TV and been a script doctor on several feature films. At the moment I’m writing a sitcom pilot for Sony UK and the pilot of another original animated series, Joe Lyttle. I look forward to sharing with you the right-brain writing techniques that will turbo-charge your scriptwriting. If you have any questions about the course, please email me at J4London@aol.com and I’ll be happy to answer them.
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