DRAFT 2: Are We Here Yet?Ī few days later, I ran into a former student who had recently graduated from college and was struggling to figure out whether to accept a job offer or spend the summer travelling abroad. I’d planned their lives before I’d taken the time to get to know them, and I soon realized that I would need to start over with a new premise and new process. I was particularly interested in dramatizing an inner transformation through motifs and spent a week meticulously plotting the story out and storyboarding some of the scenes.īut when I actually started to write the screenplay, I ran into the same problem that my students often face-my characters weren’t interested in doing what I wanted them to do. My first idea involved a character that feels lost in the modern world until he starts helping out at a funeral home. ![]() Writing the Screenplay DRAFT 1: Transformations I have tried to describe, here, the messy evolution of my screenplay and how it’s changed my approach to teaching creative writing. But returning to beginner’s mind offered me many insights into the challenges that my students-who are often writing creatively for the first time-tend to face. ![]() Not only would this teach me a little something about the genre, I thought, but if I happened to pen a big hit I just might never have to cover lunch duty again.Īs a poet, I had very little experience writing dialogue or plotting stories into three acts. To prepare for this, I applied for a grant from the Brookline, Massachusetts High School’s BHS Innovation Fund to spend my summer working on my own original screenplay. How does a writing teacher return to the “beginner’s mind” of students, and how does doing so influence his teaching practice? Ben Berman shares how the frustrations he experienced and the lessons he learned when he tried to write a screenplay changed the way he approaches teaching writing to his high school students.ĭespite the fact that I don’t own a TV, don’t subscribe to Netflix, haven’t been to a movie theater in years, and wouldn’t know a slug line if it slugged me in the face, I decided to add a screenplay unit to my creative writing class this year.
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