We had some screenwriting exercises in our tute, and since I haven’t been writing in a while I feel like I struggled a bit.

First struggle was having the confidence to get going on a prompt where I wasn’t sure if I was invested in it or not. Then having the confidence to read it out to the class.

What I learned from hearing from other people is that anything goes. Which felt fairly liberating.

I want to spend some more time over the semester actually writing stories in my own time, and practicing. To me, the most significant thing in a story that can make it or break it is character and relationships. Some of my favourite movies as of late have been those with dialogue or scripts that don’t feel like they’re bullshitting me. This includes Donnie Brasco, In Bruges and most Martin Scorcese movies. In these films, I feel as though the actors actually exist not only in the world of the film, but could exist in reality too. In a lot of Hollywood blockbuster films, dialogue feels clunky, artificial and unreal. It feels like people talk in a way that is unrealistic, or unfaithful to our own reality. I appreciate scripts that imitate, to the best of its ability, the way that people actually talk: interrupting eachother, talking over the top of eachother, etc.