“I am thinking about how screen stories are crafted, and wondering…”
For me so far, what has got me “wondering” about “screen stories” is the sheer depth in which one can delve into these worlds. While contrasting my own work’s development, with the writing prompts (about what we hate/like) we were given and the process of answering the prompt, I found it very powerful to see how much depth these characters and worlds had. In contrast with a lot of my work, which seemed to only really have superficial, face value development. The characters were underdeveloped and the overarching themes took control. This meant that my work seemed to only think of and exist in the short form world, because the world seemed impossible to expand. However, now I can see the limitless possibilities worlds have.
The other exercise was also intriguing, as we had to take an already established world and develop it further. The collaborative nature of this exercise was very unique to the art of story telling and world building. Everyone was throwing out ideas, what ifs, trying to link concepts, genres and character attributes into a unique whole. As soon as we knew we were going against the believability of the original world, we would backtrack or start anew. We, like every other group it seems, started out with a revenge tale. We also contemplated developing the story and the world from the man’s perspective. All of these concepts led to something entirely different, and possibly too dramatic for the class, a borderline agoraphobe (believes she is steadily becoming afraid of the outside world), who works as a phone sex worker (acting like someone new and entirely different in the process), and continuously day dreams about what her life would be like if she did have social contact.
Even though to me this seemed like a great fit for a very meek and shy character, I found, once I had explained the idea out loud to the class, it wasn’t as true to the original character as I had once thought. This new version was far more frustrated, numb and hollow. She was a shadow of herself, which in context of the day dreaming could make sense, but I still believe was too much of a negative jump. Possibly adjusting her character to someone who is sick and tired of seclusion, and decides to re-explore the world, gradually building herself up both mentally and physically, for the task at hand, would suit this world better?