Every screenplay that will end up becoming great usually begins with a story concept, and for so many screenwriters, it is often very challenging to come up with a great story concept.
To make every screenplay great, your roles and responsibilities as a screenwriter is to invent conflicts, develop characters, and create action scenes and mold them all into a great beginning, middle point and arrive at an intriguing resolution that ill keep your viewers at the edge of their seats.
There are so many ways to develop a story concept that makes a every screenplay great, and so in this article I am going to reveal most of those ways and if you stick and read this article to the end and afterwards implement this strategies you are going to end up with a concept that will give you the next great screenplay.
So without wasting much time, let us dive straight into this article. Shall we?
How To Develop A Screenplay Concept That Drives Your Story Forward.
Below are the different ways or methods you can adopt in order to develop a screenplay concept that will drive your story forward:
- Start with your imagination.
- Use your personal life experiences.
- Read breaking news on the media.
- Watch other movies.
- Listen and watch interviews and podcast.
- Pay attention to your dreams.
1. Start with your imagination.
Without a reasonable doubt, imagination is the foundation that every screenwriter must use to develop a screenplay concept that will help them to drive their story forward.
Someone once said that with imagination we can touch the sky, and permit me to also say that with imagination you can visit any world, and discover characters and actions that will help you to create a great story as a screenwriter.
Even though you are writing your screenplay from a true life perspective, you will never be able to craft the entire scenes needed to make a full-fledged movie washout using your imagination.
2. Use your personal life experiences.
One amazing way to develop a screenplay concept that will drive your story forward is using your own personal life experiences.
Without a reasonable doubt, every human being on earth is acting out one story or the other, and for that reason it is very easy for each and everyone of us to create a screenplay concept from whatever is going on or has even played out in our life time.
Creating a screenplay concept from your own personal life experience does not necessarily mean that you have to center or concentrate on your entire life experience.
For this reason, you can pick a particular aspect of your life and make a story out of it. For example, you can look over the relationships you have had so far and use it to create a story about romance.
Your childhood, parental, educational, job experiences etc. are also great concepts you can use to create a very captivating story.
Always remember that every great story must have a theme, which some of us refer to as genre, and that therefore leaves enough room for you to make lots of stories out of your own personal life experiences.
3. Read and watch breaking news on the media.
Another great way to develop a screenplay concept that will drive your story forward is to read and watch breaking news on the media outlets like the internet, newspapers, magazines, television etc.
The media aspect of life is daily overflowing with stories or breaking news of what is happening in other people’s life across the world, and all this stories are great ways you can develop your screenplay concept from.
One important point to note here is that these stories are not going to come in full details that will help you to create the various scenes that will make a complete story. So all you will need to do is make a logline out of them and move on to write a film treatment which will help you to draft the scenes and arrive at a full blown screenplay.
4. Watch other movies.
Watching other movies is also a great way to develop a screenplay concept that will help you to drive your story forward.
You will agree with me that you have at one time or another watch several movies that relates almost the same story, but one thing you need to understand is that no matter how two or more movies seem to relate the same story, their characters, locations and dialogues would never be the same.
But am not encouraging to make a story out of a story that is already in the big screens because it will turn your viewers off since they are all looking out to watch something they’ve never seen before.
The idea of making a great screenplay out of a movie that has already been produced is to look for the resolution and think about a better way that story might have ended/ From there you can go on to make other changes like switching the characters.
For example, if the woman was the one who cheated and destroyed the lovely relationship that was going on with her husband, you can make the husband become the cheater in your own story. And that way you story will ever have the same vibes as the one you watched.
5. Listen and watch interviews and podcast.
All thanks to the emergence of the internet which has given an opportunity for people to start their own personal podcasts which makes room for people to air out either their on personal life experiences or views they have about life in general or a particular aspect of existence.
As a smart screenwriter, you need to listen to and watch these interviews or podcasts which will help you to develop a screenplay concept that will propel your story to great heights.
6. Pay attention to your dreams.
Dreams they say are figments of human imagination, and since imagination is one of the great ways that screenwriters are able to develop several concepts for their screenplay, you can review your dreams and use them to develop a screenplay concept.
