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Back in the late 1990s, I was kicking around a story idea with a roommate in NYC about a drug mule who traveled between Mexico and the United States. The characters had some unique traits that made them perfect for narcotics trafficking, but we could never figure out what to do with the characters and put them in a story that didn’t fall into every other “drug deal gone bad” scenario floating around at the time. This was a few years after Tarantino had broken onto the scene, so you can imagine who was trying to imitate.
Both of us were inexperienced writers who didn’t have much training, so neither of us could consistently create characters and storylines daily. If I could go back to that time in my life with the techniques I have now, the last twenty years would have gone in a different direction.
Hopefully, I can save you twenty years of heartache and give you some writing exercises you can develop that can help set you on your way as a screenwriter.
The following techniques have been developed with training from private writing coaches and writing classes I’ve taken in Los Angeles. Some of these you might enjoy, others you’ll hate.
The next step after developing characters is developing situations to put them in to see how they behave.
Don't worry about plot, structure or even if the scenes can be arranged in a logical order. These techniques are designed for the preliminary writing stages when ideas are still in their rawest form.
How to free write to produce scene ideas
The first step is to start freewriting in SoCreate or journaling about your characters. You want to get a stream of consciousness flowing where you start writing about location ideas and situations you want to put your characters in.
Keep your fingers typing as you write about scenarios freely. Remember, don’t try to censor yourself by thinking an idea is too ridiculous or wouldn’t work in the script. That’s not for you to decide at this stage.
Don’t worry if scenes contradict each other or if a scene isn’t consistent with a character’s background; just get as many ideas down as possible. This is brainstorming, not the final cut.
How to write worst-case scenarios for scenes
Another way to produce scene ideas is to create a list of the worst-case scenarios for your character. Where’s the last place they want to be? What’s their great weakness or what could make everything in their life fall apart? These are the worst-case scenarios we want to see in movies. It will result in huge conflicts and enormous obstacles the characters must confront to resolve these situations. This is the essence of good storytelling.
Watch this short video for an exercise in writing worst-case scenarios.
Conceiving worst-case scenarios means knowing your character well. We can’t know the effects of kryptonite on Superman if the Superman character isn’t fleshed out.
Indiana Jones getting stuck in a pit of snakes won’t resonate unless we know his history with snakes and the traumatizing experience he had with them on a train.
One of the greatest worst-case scenarios in cinema history is Jake Gittes returning to the old neighborhood he patrolled as a police officer in “Chinatown,” written by Robert Towne. What that neighborhood means to him and his history there is the ideal worst-case scenario where plot and character intermingle perfectly.
Remember to ensure your worst-case scenarios aren't inconvenient to your character, but major problems that must be dealt with immediately or their situation could become worse.
Knowing the difference between a problem and an inconvenience is crucial for screenwriters. An inconvenience is a minor annoyance or disruption. Kryptonite isn’t an inconvenience that Superman can just ignore, it will kill him if he doesn’t deal with it in the moment. Superman flying in dangerous weather is an inconvenience, he may have problems flying, but it will not change his life if he doesn’t deal with it. The rain is frustrating to fly through, but it won’t cause a major disruption or long-term consequence, while kryptonite will.
A piece of advice I give writers when producing a list of worst-case scenarios is try putting your characters into a situation that it will take you two weeks to produce a solution to get them out of. Remember, the harder it is for your character to get out of a problem, the more engaged a reader will be in your script.
How to use a character’s goals to produce scene ideas
A final brainstorming technique to produce scene ideas is to figure out what your character wants. What are their goals? Creating obstacles to those goals is a goldmine of scene and storyline ideas.
Indiana Jones's main goal is to retrieve the Ark. What obstacles prevent him from finding it? What happens if the Ark falls into the wrong hands? What would be the long-term consequences if that happened? These are major problems in the movie that create the plot.
As Indiana Jones pursues the Ark, the Nazis try to stop him. This makes obtaining the Ark more difficult, resulting in escalating tension. This conflict fuels the plot line for “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
How to develop your scene ideas into storylines
Once you have a list of 20-30 stand-alone scene ideas for your character, you can develop them into sequences of multiple scenes strung together. How many scenes make up these sequences depends on the problem they’re attempting to overcome. The bigger the problem, the more likely a greater number of scenes will be needed.
As these sequences become longer, sometimes stringing several sequences together, you’ll develop a storyline that runs through the entire movie. Most features and TV series have an A story, which is the main character dealing with the main problem, and then B and C minor storylines that other characters deal with or the main character deals with on a smaller level. Ideally, the A, B, and C storylines can converge at the end at the climax in one scene and location. Otherwise, you wind up with one of those movies that feels like it has three endings.
These aren’t the only ways to create scenes and storylines. If you have any techniques of your own you would care to share, please @SoCreate on X!