Screenwriting 101: Mastering the Art of Story

The goal of this course is to teach you how to write any kind of feature film or TV pilot script by using a technique employed by scriptwriters from Shakespeare to Pixar: reverse engineering. Aristotle outlined this technique in the ancient world. It remains at the center of the empirical method used by modern story scientists to analyze narratives today. The opening two lectures cover the basic two-step process for applying reverse engineering to film and TV scripts: First, identify as precisely as possible the unique emotion, mood, or other psychological effect generated by the script. Does the script generate wonder, suspense, romance, or something else? Second, work back to isolate the unique blend of story components that create this psychological effect, just like a chef works back from a particular flavor to identify the unique mix of ingredients that produced it. The next four lectures organize the ingredients of scripts into four major story components: story world, character, plot, and tone. You will learn to create new story worlds by modifying the rules of comedy, tragedy, horror, and any other kind of story genre. You will learn how to establish main characters, minor characters, and antagonists, and how to create their action and dialogue. You will see how to plot scenes and fulllength scripts by starting from the final scene and working back. And you will learn how to wield a screenwriter’s most powerful tool, tone, by creating a narrator who helps the reader see just how the script should be filmed. In the following 12 lectures on film, you will practice the course’s method for analyzing and writing scripts by applying it to a dozen film scripts that have been selected by the Writers’ Guild of America as some of the best of all time. In each case, the lecture will identify the special psychological effect of each script and trace it back to its own special blueprint of story world, character, plot, and tone. This provides you with a blueprint to produce work like each script yourself. More broadly, it gives you a general method for writing like any script you choose. In the next five lectures on TV, you will learn about the major innovation of TV writing: a story engine that allows TV writers to generate hour after hour of consistent material without ever falling into formulaic plots. You will see the general qualities of all TV engines and then learn the specific features of the TV engines that drive cable dramas like Game of Thrones, sitcoms like The Simpsons, procedurals like CSI, and primetime soap operas like Grey’s Anatomy. The final lecture provides some practical tips for using this course to increase your appreciation of films and TV, for honing your own personal storytelling style, and for writing a film or TV script and getting it out into the world.■