Finally. We are in our final week of the semester.

And still, we’re pushing out a couple more writing exercises to keep us in the groove of drafting our screenplays.

Today, we talked about exposition and how we could say something without saying it at all (i.e. without using dialogue). An interesting point was made which was that a way to keep people interested is actually by not telling them things. The less information you give to the audience makes them more anxious and anticipate what is going to happen next.

This made me think about my screenplay and what I’ve written so far. While I know it’s a story about someone who has anxiety, I realised that I never actually explicitly stated that Haven (main character) has anxiety. Throughout the story, she has moments where she looses herself momentarily and we hear her heart beat racing quickly and how she starts breathing quickly and heavily – all signs of her anxiety being triggered.

But overall, I haven’t actually said, or have her, or any of the characters, state that she has anxiety. And this made think about my previous blog post about finding direction for this narrative. While Coralie will help Haven by offering advice on how to cope with anxiety, in their conversation/Coralie’s flashback, I won’t state that Coralie has anxiety as well.

As for the ending, I think I will end it with Haven entering a doctor’s office where she will have her first psychology/counselling appointment. Hopefully this will incite some curiosity in readers but still get the theme of the story across. I think with my story being so much about the internal, there’s plenty of things people don’t say that they want to. So I think it will be interesting how I play with this idea as I finish this short screenplay of mine.