Screenwriting from the Inside Out: Think and Write like a Creative 3031405196, 9783031405198

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Screenwriting from the Inside Out Think and Write like a Creative

Margaret McVeigh

Screenwriting from the Inside Out

Margaret McVeigh

Screenwriting from the Inside Out Think and Write like a Creative

Margaret McVeigh Griffith Film School Griffith University Brisbane, QLD, Australia

ISBN 978-3-031-40519-8    ISBN 978-3-031-40520-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40520-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

To live a creative life is one of the greatest gifts I can imagine. To be brought up with the opportunity, freedom, and education to believe I could achieve anything I set my mind to, is an even greater gift. For this gift I thank my father, Tom McVeigh. For her love, elegance, and steadfast belief in, and support of her children, I thank my mother, Mary McVeigh. To be challenged to get on with it, have a laugh and enjoy the diamonds of life, I thank my four little bros, Tom, Mick, Professor JJ, and Pierre. Growing up and growing wiser with you has served me well in my life and work. To be surrounded by the love and support to work a creative life, I thank my husband, David. I know you always have my back. To work in a creative institution is an ongoing gift to a creative and academic. Griffith Film School, Griffith University is such a place. But a place is more than that, it is its people. It is its values and its spirit. I thank Griffith University for giving me the research leave in Summer 2021–2022 to do the reading I needed to do, to propose this book. To my Head of School, Professor Herman Van Eyken, thank you for believing in and supporting my research and teaching into creativity, as I travelled that road not taken. To my wonderful commissioning editor, at Palgrave, Lina Aboujieb and my book editors, Tryphena R. and Sheela Jasmine, thank you for working to publish this book. Last and not least, to my sons, David and James. You showed me what true creativity means. To be part of your childhood as you wondered how to free your bikes bogged in the mangrove mud flats, or worked out whether your dog Mac could fly when attached to a toy parachute and launched onto a bean bag from the cubby house, was to see the infinite possibilities of the creative mind in action.

Preface

This Is That Book This is that book that seeks to share some of the secrets of how to be creative by linking the transdisciplinary fields of screenwriting as creative practice and cognitive psychology and neuroscience. It is that book that covers all aspects of screenwriting and creativity, not just the traditional aspects of craft with allusions to creativity by way of anecdote or creativity exercises. It is that book that uses theory to underpin how the screenwriter may develop their creativity and craft in tandem, written specifically with them in mind. It is that book that is suitable for educators, students, and emerging and accomplished screenwriters alike. It is that book that provides the metacognitive and creative tools required to develop one’s voice as a screenwriter, while at the same time offering a rich account of how screenwriting and creativity works. This is that book, Screenwriting from the Inside Out: Think and Write Like a Creative, that book about how to think like a creative so that you can write better. Brisbane, QLD, Australia

Margaret McVeigh

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Contents

1 Introduction  1 On the Journey to Create   2 What Do to with Those Ideas?   5 So How is This Book Different?   6 As You May Think   7 References   8 2 Screenwriting  and Creativity: From the Inside Out 11 So, You Want to Write a Screenplay?  12 The Nuts and Bolts of Screenwriting  14 Screenwriting and Creativity: Secrets and Lies  16 Creativity is out There!  21 Creativity is in Here  24 The C’s of Creativity  26 Working Out Your Creative Process  27 The Creative Process  28 What If?  32 References  34 3 How  do Creatives Think? 37 Where Do Ideas Come From?  38 Getting an Idea  40 As We May Think  42 Getting New Ideas  43 ix

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Getting It Together  46 Retrofitting: Practice into Theory  51 Where To from Here?  51 What If?  52 References  53 4 Your  Creative Personal Identity: And What to Do About It 55 Only You: Your Artistic Identity  56 The Big 5: The Huge 2—What the Hell Are They Talking About?  59 Understanding Your Creative Personal Identity  61 Why Create? The Blinding Power of Intrinsic Motivation  63 The Power of Emotion and Motivation  66 Tapping into Emotion  67 What If?  71 References  73 5 Finding  the Lightbulb Moment: Inspiration and Envisioning 77 Finding Inspiration  78 The Creativity Maze  79 A Room of One’s Own  83 Ritual and Reward  85 Daydreaming, Dreaming, and Doing Automatic Tasks  86 Creativity and the Unconscious  87 Which Fish to Catch?  88 As We May think … To a Point  89 Right Brain Go/Left Brain Stop: Intuitive Thinking  91 Memory: Our Creative Well  93 Taking a Moment  95 What If?  96 References  97 6 Catching  the Big Fish: Research and Insight 99 On the Road to Find Out 100 What is Research? 101 Learning from the Masters 101

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Doing the Hard Yards 102 Turning the Pages of Research 104 Imagination and Imagining 108 Insight: The Dramatic Center and Truth 111 Finding the Lightbulb Moment 113 What If? 118 References 120 7 Writing  and Flow. Just do it!123 Putting Words on the Page 124 Finding Flow 126 Being in the Zone 128 Staying in the Zone 129 To Structure or Not to Structure: That Is the Question 131 Headlights and Stop Lights 134 Grit and More Grit 137 Dealing with Roadblocks 140 A Little Quiet Please: The Place of Meditation and Mindfulness 141 Being More Mindful 147 What If? 148 References 150 8 It  Could be More: Sharing and Shaping153 It Could Be More! 154 Putting It Out There 157 What Are We Looking For? 159 Feedback. Good or Bad? 163 It Could be Still More 165 Checking in on Metaphor and Meaning 168 Testing the Emotional Rollercoaster 169 Dealing the Cards of the Table Read 172 What If? 174 References 176

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9 A  Creative Thinking and Writing Tool. The Creativity Metacognitive Framework179 Creative Metacognition 180 Thinking and Writing Like a Creative 181 What If? 181 References 184 10 Living  a Creative Life. Be Bold!187 Living a Creative Life 188 Breaking the Rules 188 Be Bold! 189 References 190 Index191

About the Author

Margaret McVeigh, PhD  is Head, Screenwriting and Contextual Studies at Griffith Film School, Griffith University, Australia. She holds a Masters of Screenwriting by Creative Practice and a PhD in Film and Narrative. Margaret has worked in the media in Australia and overseas, including as Commissioning Editor for Wiley publishers and as a Writer for the Australian National Broadcaster’s, ABC Splash. Margaret is a leader in the academic field of screenwriting as creative practice as 2022 Chair of the SRN (Screenwriting Research Network International) and as convenor and host of the ASPERA 2022 annual conference, Creativity Matters at Griffith Film School. She is coeditor of the book, Transcultural Screenwriting: Telling Stories for a Global World (2017) and cowriter of the award-­ winning feature documentary, Love Opera (2019) screened in Australian cinemas and at the Cannes Film Festival. Her chapter, Work in Progress: The Writing of Shortchanged in The Palgrave Handbook of Screen Production (2019), explores her creative process in writing a feature film, development-funded by Screen Queensland. Margaret has published and presented at conferences in Australia, Europe, USA, and South America on screenwriting and the creative process. She was 2022 recipient of the University of Navarra, Spain, Research Fellowship and Keynote Speaker at the 2022 MIC (Marconi Institute of Creativity) 7 C’s of Creativity annual conference, Bologna, Italy. In her role as Creativity Coach in her screenwriting and film studies classes, Margaret continues to research, teach about, and be amazed by how a knowledge of creativity empowers the joy and passion of living, working, and writing as a “creative.” xiii

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract  This chapter is the introduction to Screenwriting from the Inside Out: Think and Write Like a Creative. It sets the scene and provides the author’s backstory to her journey and passion to provide the reader with a practical and informed way to learn how to think and write like a “creative” (the film industry term commonly used to refer to members of the key creative team—the writer, director, or producer). The chapter introduces the premise underpinning the book—to provide the screenwriter with awareness of their creative process and to give them the agency and power that comes with this. It discusses how the integration of theory about writing from screenwriting, and theory about thinking from cognitive psychology and neuroscience, can help the emerging screenwriter not only to write their story, but also to activate the parts of the brain to build on “what they know”, to create innovative and unusual stories. The chapter outlines how the book delves into scientific research from cognitive psychology and neuroscience to provide a robust account of why what screenwriters may do intuitively actually works, and can be replicated in a screenwriting career. It reassures the reader that it doesn’t matter how they like to write a story—what matters is how they are aware of their creative process so they can channel what works for them to build on their passion and deep knowledge of a type of storytelling they love, to create new stories that are uniquely theirs.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. McVeigh, Screenwriting from the Inside Out, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40520-4_1

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Keywords  Screenwriting • Creativity • Creative process • Script development as reflective creative practice To all established, emerging, or aspiring screenwriters, I have written this book for you. I believe that if we know how we are thinking as we write, we will be able to write better. It goes without saying that all the story ideas and knowledge about screenwriting craft are shaped by our brains before, during, and even after we write. I believe if we know what the brain is doing during the creative process of screenwriting, we will be able to master both craft and creativity to become the best writers we can be. We still don’t understand how the mind works but we do know that being original and creative is an essential part of being human. To be original and creative, you may need to step outside the square and have the courage to be true to yourself and the way your mind intuitively works. Writing about creativity from an artistic and scientific perspective, as I am doing in this book, requires striking a balance between too much and not enough detail, it assumes many things about what the reader knows if you are already a writer, and would like to find out if you are not, and vice versa, while making the book assessable to all. Ultimately, I trust the insights I am sharing are inspirational and fun.

On the Journey to Create The background to my writing this book and my research into writing and creativity starts way back with lessons of how I was told to write when I first went to school. In hindsight I was being asked to write about what I knew. But the problem was I did not think I knew anything interesting or creative to write about. I grew up on a farm on the Darling Downs grain belt in rural Australia. A farm on an endless black soil plain called the Prairie. The farm was called Prairie View. The view was pretty much the same anyway I looked—one from a rambling farmhouse surrounded by lines of scrubby Athel pine trees to other farmhouses surrounded by lines of scrubby Athel pines. In fact, every which way I  looked I saw the same thing. Given that this is what in script writing we call my “reality”, how could I write creatively about what I knew (a key script writing term to encourage the creative flow of storytelling) if I thought I didn’t “know” anything? And how could I address the biggest “what if” creative question

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each week when asked to write a story about one of these three recurring topics: A Day at the Beach A Picnic My Pet Certainly, there were not many instances of reality that inspired me as child to write about a day at the beach, something that occurred for the man on the land once a year during the first week of school term, when holiday rates were cheap and no one else was around. So how could I, as a child, have been creative? And why am I telling you this story when we are writing about creativity? It is a question that I think we need to address because the truth is, if we are working writers, we may sometimes have to write on spec or for a client about a story we do not feel that inspired by. So how can we write the equivalent of a “Day at the Beach” story when we are not inspired? Can we expect ourselves to be creative when the essential element in storytelling is missing—the need to tell the story because it is important, because it is relevant to our reality and must be shared? Two things I remember from my high school education. Because I was a smart girl, I was channeled into doing Physics and Maths B when in fact what I loved was writing and art. I can still recall looking at the classroom clock as the Physics teacher droned on about the next equation we were going to prove. Then we did the slinky experiment, and scientific thinking revolutionized the way I, as an artist, saw the world. For those who have not done the slinky experiment, it is fun. Basically, two people hold a very long slinky of coiled steel between them and shake it out to see how fast the coils move. Then you apply the formula to calculate speed and motion. Then you think about how this can be applied in real life. Doing this experiment and understanding how the formula for momentum explained why the first car at a traffic light seemed to take forever to take off on the green  light, with each car behind getting slower, was a revelation. This practical insight, gained from science combined with my maths’ teacher working out the theorem 2πr to find the circumference of a circle, helped me understand how science and maths give us tools to understand how our world works, has stayed with me all my life. The theorem was the key. Because I know if I understand how something works, I can make it work

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better—and also make sure I try to get to the front of the line at the traffic lights! I can still remember the feeling. When I understood the formula or why the formula worked, I was liberated. I could understand why I had to apply it. And I have never looked back. This is why I am writing this book. So you can understand what works for you when you write so you can do more of what works best to make your writing unique and creative. The technical term for this thinking tool is “metacognition”—being able to think about how you are thinking! But let’s get back to the here and now and what you know. Most of the time developing a story requires focus and passion and a knowledge of the rules of craft. If you are reading this book, most likely you want to find out more about the craft of screenwriting and how to write for this unique and very visual and metaphoric mode of writing which creates the blueprint for a film. In my teaching and working life, I have found that students are often hesitant to believe in themselves as writers because they think that there is a secret formula that everyone must follow. Not true! Everyone has their own process, and this is what this book is about. It is about exploring and sharing ideas that have been proven to work for others and then choosing what works for you as an individual writer. My journey into learning about screenwriting theory and craft was sparked by my discovery of a deep and dark family secret that I was driven to share and write about. My two boys were babies when at a family reunion I discovered that an ancestor had murdered her children and put them to bed in the room I used to sleep in when I stayed over at my grandparents place as a child. That day my family and I visited the graves of those three children. The need to tell this story set me on the journey to write this book. Even though I had university qualifications in professional writing and literature, had taught writing to senior school, and had worked as a writer in public relations and publishing, I really felt I did not know how to write creatively when I was confronted with this story. I completed a master’s in screenwriting and wrote a feature film script based on this inciting incident. I spent many years learning the craft of screenwriting and many years reading every book about creativity that I could find. But I always felt there was something missing in what I read. I needed to understand the mathematical equivalent of the theorem. I felt to really

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improve my writing I needed to know more than the rules of craft, or indeed how to break the rules. I needed to know more about why the many random ways that I had worked out how to make my writing more creative, worked—ways like how to find flow; reasons why I needed to clean the house just when I knew that there was an idea waiting to find; or why sometimes it was important for me to sit in a café or go for a walk by the sea. These things worked for me, and I wanted to know why. I wanted to know how my brain was working with ideas so that I could do what I did better, to write more creatively, to write a screenplay that was new and original, the very definition of creativity!

What Do to with Those Ideas? In screenwriting, it’s the ideas and what you do with them that are the most important. Anyone can have a good idea but it’s what to do with the idea that is the work of the screenwriter. Most of you will know what I am talking about. Sometimes the idea will literally seem to take you by the hand and lead you along the pathway of themes and images that flow as you think and write. If this happens, it is great. It usually means that that idea had been simmering and developing in the background of your mind for many months or years, or even for your whole life, like the case of my family story that was just waiting to be discovered and told fresh and anew. But for most of us, this happens rarely. It takes a long time for a writer’s first feature film to get made, which is the mark of a screenwriter having “made it”. This is Big C Creativity where your work is recognized professionally. Funny that. This observation is substantiated in the field of psychology research where Hayes (1989) proposes that the mastery of your domain is aligned with the ten-year rule. Ten years is not such a long time to learn a craft like screenwriting. Factor in maybe an undergraduate degree in screenwriting or creative writing, some work experience and practice, practice, practice, and Hayes’ tenyear rule figures! In Screenwriting from the Inside Out: Think and Write Like a Creative, I provide you with a practical and informed way to learn how to think and write like a “creative”. I will delve into scientific research from cognitive psychology and neuroscience to help you write  your story, but also to activate the parts of the brain that are thirsty for new knowledge to build on the old, so that you can create innovative and unusual stories. It doesn’t

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matter how you like to write a story—for example, if you love genre or are an addict to structure that is okay—what matters is how you build on this passion and deep knowledge of the types of stories you love, to create new stories that are uniquely yours.

So How is This Book Different? Screenwriting from the Inside Out: Think and Write Like a Creative provides a new way of learning how to write a screenplay by exploring how you, as a writer, think at each stage of the screenwriting creative process by applying knowledge from creativity research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. It shows you how you can use this knowledge to challenge yourself to writer deeper, richer, and more engaging screenplays. It is designed to help you discover your unique personal voice and the type of stories you could tell in a global context, whist overviewing the craft of screenwriting as part of the creative process. This book is different from, but complements other screenwriting “how to” books by applying contemporary scientific research about creativity to the craft of screenwriting. It provides a stepped approach to discovering how you think shapes what you write, so that you may understand how to write better. The focus of this book is to ask you to first and foremost think about yourself as a “creative”. The premise underpinning the book is to provide you as the screenwriter with the awareness of your creative process to give you the agency and power that comes with this. How is your work developed from the inside out? What is happening in your brain as you create new ideas? What is happening in the world around you and why is this important? How does all this impact on the development of your script? In this way, the book acknowledges that the creation of a script is your unique individual work. It is your work that creates the script, the blueprint for the collaborative work of other creatives which will transform your words on a page to images on a screen. This is your screenwriter superpower! For those of you who want to know how I got to thinking about and integrating the theories of screenwriting, film studies, and cognitive psychology and neuroscience underpinning the book, it is interesting to note that the field of creativity research in psychology is over 100 years old and that there is a robust and respected body of scientific theory supporting it. However, the field of cognitive neuroscience is only decades old since

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technology like the MRI has afforded an insight into the workings of the brain. But there is a robust and respected body of scientific theory supporting it. On the other hand, the field of screenwriting research is relatively new. Research in the field of screenwriting or script development as reflective creative practice, as it is known in the academy, has only been established in the last decade or so with the Screenwriting Research Network (SRN), The Journal of Screenwriting, and books like this one and others in the Palgrave Studies in Screenwriting Series.

As You May Think So, let’s have a look at you as a writer and what you are thinking. Let’s consider why you are thinking that way. Let’s put this all together so that you can think and write better. No matter whether you are an experienced or a novice screenwriter, Screenwriting from the Inside Out: Think and Write like a Creative will give you new tools to help you understand and master the creative process, new tools to understand what your brain is doing as you conjure and write your wonderful screenplay and either hone or learn your craft. There are many great “how to” books about screenwriting craft dating back to Aristotle’s Poetics. It is up to you to decide which of these works for you whether they be formulaic or experimental. Screenwriting from the Inside Out: Think and Write like a Creative provides a valuable complement, or alternative to your favorite screenwriting books. It alludes to the basics of the screenwriting process from beginning to end and is illustrated by comments from emerging and established screenwriters from around the world. Chapters may be “dipped into” at whatever stage of the screenwriting creative process you are at, or read from end to end. To set the scene, the book considers key aspects of screenwriting craft scaffolded by an original four-stage model of the creative process drawn from studies in creativity and cognitive psychology—Inspiration and Envisioning, Research and Insight, Writing and Flow, and Shaping and Sharing (McVeigh 2014, 2016, 2019; McVeigh in McVeigh et al. 2023). At each stage of the creative process, the book refers to the relevant aspects of screenwriting craft. For example, at the Inspiration and Envisioning of screenwriting and the creative process, elements like the screen idea, character, and emotion are considered in the context of what is happening in the brain as we develop ideas.

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The beauty of this book is how it aligns and applies scientific research from the cognitive psychology laboratory to the creative process in screenwriting, in bite size, user-friendly ways to validate what have been up until now, assertions about creativity and screenwriting, for the most part drawn from anecdote, rather than robust scientific research. Overall, the book integrates how you write with how you think, so that ultimately you can challenge yourself to write a better screenplay. Each chapter contains: • “Work in Progress”, a list of the key craft terms to be considered at the relevant stage covered in the chapter—whether it be Inspiration and Envisioning, Research and Insight, Writing and Flow, or Shaping and Sharing. • Screenwriting craft elements referred to at the relevant stage of the creative process. • What cognitive psychology and neuroscience say about creativity as relevant to this stage of the creative process. • On-the-ground testimonials from published and original interviews with established and emerging screenwriters, woven throughout the chapters to illustrate the theory in action. All interviews with students at Griffith Film School have been conducted under Research Ethics GU Ref No: 2019/327. • What If? A concluding coda of three activities to choose from for thinking and writing like a creative, drawn from the theory developed in the chapter, that you can use to put the ideas of the chapter into practice. • A list of the academic references referred to in the chapter to underline the robust nature of the work, as well as for further reading if something really intrigues you and you want to know more.

References Aristotle. Poetics. Translated by S.H.  Butcher. Accessed May 2, 2023. https:// www.gutenberg.org/files/1974/1974-­h/1974-­h.htm#link2H_4_0002. Hayes, John, R. 1989. “Cognitive processes in creativity,” in Handbook of Creativity, ed. J. A. Glover, R. R. Ronning, and C. R. Reynolds. New York: Plenum Press. 135–146. McVeigh, Margaret. 2014. Can Creativity Be Taught? Screen Education, Issue 75, Spring.

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———. 2016. Finding the Lightbulb Moment: Creativity& Inspiration in the Teaching of the Craft of Screenwriting. ASPERA. http://aspera.org.au/ research/. ———. 2019. Work-in-Progress: The Writing of Shortchanged. In The Palgrave Handbook of Screen Production, eds. C. Batty, M. Berry, K. Dooley, B. Frankham, and S. Kerrigan. Palgrave Macmillan. 157–168. McVeigh, Margaret, Valquaresma, Andreia and Karwowski, Maciej. 2023. Fostering Creative Agency through Screenwriting: An Intervention. Creativity Research Journal. Taylor & Francis. https://doi.org/10.1080/10400419. 2023.2168341.

CHAPTER 2

Screenwriting and Creativity: From the Inside Out

Abstract  This chapter addresses the reader and asks them why they want to write a screenplay. What impels them to write? What is their creative process? The chapter sets the personal tone and use of direct reader address that enlivens and situates the creativity theory discussed in the book, to give the reader the knowledge to make informed creative and craft decisions so that they can write better. It defines and sets up the book’s investigation of creativity and screenwriting through the four stages of the creative process: Inspiration and Envisioning; Research and Insight; Writing and Flow; and Shaping and Sharing (McVeigh 2020; McVeigh et al. 2023) unpacked across the book. To do this the chapter reflects on the current research landscape investigating creativity and the creative process of screenwriting. This includes a brief look at what has been written in Hollywood screenwriting “how to” manuals, work from writers of popular non-fiction in creativity, and theory from the emerging academic field of screenwriting as creative practice. But most of all it highlights the fact that there is more we can learn from the truly exciting (but scant) research coming from findings from case studies in both screenwriting and cognitive psychology and neuroscience. The work of the chapter is encapsulated

Work in Progress Creative Process Stage: A Model of The Creative Process Craft Stage: A Model of The Creative Process © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. McVeigh, Screenwriting from the Inside Out, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40520-4_2

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under the framework heading “Work in Progress” which crystallizes the relevant stage of thinking and writing like a creative. The “Creative Process Stage” explores key creativity theory and the “Craft Stage” backgrounds key screenwriting theory. The “What If?” section of the chapter is a concluding coda of three activities for thinking and writing like a creative, drawn from the ideas developed in the chapter. Keywords  Screenwriting • Creativity • Creative process She took her hand and raised her brush. For a moment it stayed trembling in a painful but exciting ecstasy in the air. Where to begin?… That was the question at what point to make the first mark? One line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions. All that in idea seemed simple became in practice immediately complex; as the waves shape themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, but to the swimmer among them are divided by steep gulfs, and foaming crests. Still the risk must run; the mark made. (Virginia Woolf. 1927. To the Lighthouse)

So, You Want to Write a Screenplay? There are many ways of writing a screenplay. Where to begin? It can come in fragments or it may come all at once. No matter how your screen story comes to you, it is a matter of learning the craft, experimenting, and creating a routine—the times, the places, and the scenarios in which to ponder, imagine, write, rewrite, and read. Most of all, it is about learning how to stay true to your central idea when faced with indecision and uncertainty about “what happens next?” in the development of your script. What sparks the initial idea for a screenplay? There may be some idea, incident, or injustice that you want to write about or explore in a film. How does it germinate and develop into what you believe is a story ready to be shared? How do you “know” what you want to write about? This is the burning question for all writers whether they be established or emerging. So where do we start? There are a number of answers to this question. The first answer lies in a screenwriting adage; start with “what you know”. However, it must be noted that starting with “what you know” is not to limit us to the here and now; it can also be interpreted as “what you know to be true”, “what

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you know emotionally to be true”, or “what you know you may want to find out about”. The need to base a story on a writer’s personal experience is, according to acclaimed Japanese screenwriter Kaneto Shindo, reflected in this pertinent observation: Who does a writer write about? He writes about himself… I do not know what my closest friend is thinking. I do not know anyone else’s mind, but I do know who I am. (Shindo in McGrath and MacDermott 2003, 92–93)

The second answer to the question of knowing what to write, is to write about something you feel strongly about. Screenwriting author and director William Froug underlines the importance of taking what you know and feel strongly about—your “reality” as the starting point for inspiration and the creative spark: The single most important gift you must bring to your screenplay is writing what you feel deeply about. Very likely what you are about is what every human on this planet is about … All the drama you need is in your own life, in your own experiences … You are a bottomless well of experiences and emotions, and as a screenwriter, the place to put them is in your script. The job you have is to dig down inside yourself and discover as much about who you are and what you feel as is possible, then bring it to the surface, examine it, and see how to put it to work for you … Sure there’s always the risk of failure, but all Creativity rests on a willingness to take risks. Screenwriting is not only about Creativity, it is also about bravery. (Froug 1996, 197–198)

To help you know what you want to write about, I have learnt that my students find it helpful to investigate how other writers get their ideas. Steven Zaillian, writer of the Academy Award-winning film Schindler’s List (1993), says, “the first thing I get hooked on is a feeling or a tone, sometimes an idea” (Zaillian in McGrath and MacDermott 2003, 40). However, no matter what we learn from accomplished writers and filmmakers, sometimes what we try will work, and sometimes it won’t. The work of this book is to help you understand why certain ways of thinking may sometimes  work  and sometimes may not, and to align this understanding with your knowledge and  development in the craft of screenwriting.

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The Nuts and Bolts of Screenwriting There are a lot of “Screenwriting 101” books out there written by experts who are often referred to as “gurus”. Some are bibles that offer a step-by-­ step formula to the mechanics of screenwriting. Some offer alternate scenarios to the Hollywood enshrined hero’s journey. Some offer a grab-bag of strategies gleaned from collections of interviews with successful screenwriters. Some offer creative writing exercises and a critical analysis of how exemplar screenplays work. All offer elements that can help a screenwriter learn their craft. We can all learn something from each and every one of these books. It just depends on what works for you. This book does not set out to replace any of these great books, as each and every one of us has our favorites— whether they be structure driven or based on intuition. The important thing to remember is to not be a slave to the way someone else says, “this is how to write a screenplay”. Rather think about what the guru is saying and see if it works for you. I suggest you read the books that intrigue you and take from them what you will. They all have great things to say. While it is important to remember that they have been regarded as experts and that their work is popular, in the long run you need to be independent and work out your own way of writing. This is where I will sneak in my first bit of Creativity theory. The fact is that Creativity theorists have found one of the key attributes of the successful creative person is “independence”. What more can I say? We will get to the nuts and bolts of this theory in later chapters. But back to the basics of screenwriting craft. There are books that state that at a certain page a certain plot point must occur—like Syd Field’s dictum about turning points where, for example, the first act turning point of a script should occur at a certain page number. There are great books about craft like Robert McKee’s Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting (1999), which is full of insights and examples. There are also books like Linda Aronson’s detailed and insightful analysis of screenplays which she has used to offer theories of how complex interweaving stories can be written, as well as Dona Cooper’s visceral images of the story as a roller coaster in Writing Great Screenplays for Film and TV (1997). These and others like Blake Synder’s Save the Cat (2005) have it all covered so I am not going to restate the obvious.

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What I really would like to emphasize is the fact that all these books are based on the “rules” for making and crafting a story, taken from the first “manual of screenwriting” ever published—Aristotle’s Poetics. Poetics means active making essentially a recipe for drama. The original term “poetics” is derived from the Greek word “poiesis” or “active making” and the Poetics established the elements that a craftsman should address when writing dramatic poetry. (Aristotle Poetics, Section 1, Part VIII: 7 in McVeigh 2009, 13–15)

The Poetics are in fact a collection of what Aristotle taught his students, as collated by them. What we have today are their notes about what Aristotle said about Greek Dramatic Tragedy (and to some extent Greek Comedy), one of the earliest forms of drama. Most of the “go to” screenwriting books will talk about structure. They effectively translate Aristotle’s rules for good drama into the rising three (or sometimes four) structure of a dramatic tragedy with “a beginning, middle and end”. But some don’t let us know that Aristotle and later the famous radical French New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, also gave us that well known adage about the beginning, middle and end, “not necessarily being in that order”. Most “how to” books will talk about what Aristotle said were the requirements of good drama—character in conflict. Conflict being character in action. Most will suggest great tactics for writing dialogue and scenes. Most will comprehensively cover the formatting of that strange beast, the screenplay, with its big print, indentations for dialogue, and specifics about how a scene is numbered. So in essence screenwriting craft is a domain that one can master with learning and practice, and the screenwriting manuals have this covered. This book is not a manual which is going to provide a join-the-dots recipe that promises success (not that the books I have mentioned do but there are some like this out there). Rather, it is a book that will help you use which of the “how to” books you want to use to master your craft. It is a book that will take you to the next level of craft because for every craft decision you make, you will know why and how you can make the best creative choice. This is because this book, Screenwriting from the Inside Out: Think and Write like a Creative, will bring together research into creativity from science as well as research into creativity from the arts.

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I think it is useful for us to understand how we can harness our creativity in tandem with our knowledge of craft—at whatever stage of our screenwriting life that may be—by considering the long history of theory regarding the importance placed on the roles of inspiration (sometimes synonymous with creativity and imagination but not really as we will see later), and creativity and craft in the creation of art. I think that it is super interesting to know that there is a field of academic research specifically focused on studying creativity, and it spans many disciplines including educational psychology, organizational psychology (e.g., studies of creativity and innovation in large organizations), cognitive psychology, and, in recent decades, cognitive neuroscience. And to an emerging extent, in the arts, including screenwriting, music, and art itself. So let’s look now at what we mean exactly by the term “creativity” as this is the basis of how this book will help you empower your craft. I want to take you through what is written in the screenwriting manuals, then research in the academic field of screenwriting so then you can get a handle on the ways other fields like cognitive psychology, organizational psychology, educational psychology, psychology in art, music and literature and cognitive neuroscience think about creativity, and how this brings us new insights and in essence super powers, in thinking about creativity as we practice our craft.

Screenwriting and Creativity: Secrets and Lies The screenwriting gurus allude to the importance of creativity in screenwriting craft but it is not the territory they set out to explore in their books. Creativity is more or less acknowledged as an unconscious process that just happens. But they do know it is “out there”. Generally, any discussion of creativity deals with ideas at the inspiration stage. I believe we can be more creative and write better if we know what creativity is, how to conceptualize the creative process and harness this as we write. But first let’s see what the screenwriting experts say about creativity, so we are all on the same page. Robert McKee in his seminal book Story: Substance, structure, style and the principles of screenwriting (1999) does not address the creative process in itself; he more or less places creativity in the role of savior that frees the subconscious to “do its thing” once we master the craft. Of craft, he asserts, “There is no conspiracy to keep secret the truths of our art. In the

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twenty-three centuries since Aristotle wrote the Poetics, the ‘secrets’ of story have been as public as the library down the street. Nothing in the craft of storytelling is abstruse … I’ve written story to empower your command of the craft” (1999, 5–10). Of creativity, he alludes to it thus: Without craft, the best a writer can do is snatch the first idea off the top of his head, then sit helpless in front of his own work … But when the conscious mind is put to work on the objective task of executing the craft, the spontaneous surfaces. Mastery of craft frees the unconscious. (McKee 1999, 22)

While McKee places craft as the most important element of screenwriting, other screenwriting manuals authors do acknowledge the importance of creativity, again in the realms of inspiration, albeit minimally. Acclaimed Australian Linda Aronson’s craft-focused manual, Scriptwriting Updated: New and Conventional Ways of Writing for the Screen (2000), devotes “Part 1: Getting Ideas” (the first 35 pages of her 291-page book) to ways to utilize other screen and story models including genre, myth, themes, ideas, life events, art, music, and images to generate ideas. American screenwriting manual author Linda Seger in Making a Good Script Great (1994) also devotes a Chapter, “Gathering Ideas”, to creativity. Seger considers many acknowledged creative strategies for generating ideas, including journaling on paper or using index cards to gather and shape random ideas, because as she asserts, “the creative process wants to move from chaos to order, your mind will naturally begin to see the relationships of one card to another” (Seger 1994, 7). In Writing Great Screenplays for Film and TV, American Dona Cooper also devotes a chapter, entitled “Creativity: The Building Process”, to creativity in screenwriting. Like Seger, Cooper sees the creative process as a means of imposing order on chaos and contends that to avoid uncertainty many writers “cling to the seeming certainty of formulas”, but, in so doing, they lose contact with their “own personal insights and passions” which make writing more vivid and original (Cooper 1997, 27–29). The answer to this conundrum for Cooper is to see the integral nature of creativity and craft as a type of system of questions and answers where “you can focus on the craft to trigger the ‘function’ questions in your mind, then search through your creative instincts to find the answers” (Cooper 1997, 29). Cooper states:

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The reason you need craft and creativity is that each serves a different function. Like the left brain/right brain interaction of the human mind, both have a vital place in the creative process … Therefore, a great script needs the spark of creative passion and excitement that only inspiration can provide, as well as the clarity and logic that craft can ensure. (Cooper 1997, 28)

While Cooper does not provide answers as to ways of tapping into creativity and craft at the same time, beyond noting the visceral “click” that “happens when something feels right, and the nudging discomfort when something is wrong” (Cooper 1997, 30), she does offer the suggestion to the teacher of screenwriting that creativity and craft are inextricably entwined. More recently, screenwriting theorists have incorporated creative exercises as part of the teaching of the craft elements of screenwriting. Christina Kallas, in her excellent book on Screenwriting, Creative Screenwriting Understanding Emotional Structure (2010), provides an alternative to structure-based screenwriting manuals. Her work offers a system for “creative screenwriting” based on her work as a screenwriting teacher and provides a comprehensive and insightful journey through her philosophy of screenwriting grounded in the work of theorists including Aristotle (in Kallas 2010, 24–35), the German theorist, Freytag (in Kallas 2010, 18–19), the Czech screenwriting teacher, Frank Daniel (in Kallas 2010, 19–21), and her own screenwriting teacher, Linda Seger (in Kallas 2010, 21). Kallas’ work also provides a rationale for the importance of improvisation and play as vital elements of the creative process of screenwriting (Kallas 2010, 16), as well a comprehensive bible of how to teach screenwriting from beginning to end. In chapters devoted to the structural elements of the screenplay, she incorporates the creative exercises she uses with her students to address specific elements of screenwriting craft. As I said earlier, there is something to take from all of these books about learning the craft of screenwriting, but each guru acknowledges that although creativity exists, it is not dealt with in their practical “how to” books. So where does this leave us if we are to understand how to be creative while we are writing? It is important to remember that academic research (research that has been published by university researchers and is deemed to be robust and endorsed by experts) into the individual and their writing processes during script development is an emerging field. The first thing to remember when

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you read about the research is that it is meant to shine a light on the ways that experts have found works for screenwriters, and that we can take from this research what works for us. This helps us understand that while what each of us does as a writer may seem something that we have worked out along the way, there is a body of evidence that offers insights into the way that others work, so that we can learn from this and enrich our own creativity and craft. With this in mind, let’s take a brief journey into what script development (the academic field in which research into screenwriting belongs) says about creativity. I think it is important for us as lone writers in “a room of our own” (the idea made popular by the acclaimed novelist Virginia Woolfe in her eponymous novel) to remember that up until the last ten years or so there was not much written academically about the way writers like to work. I certainly found that when I started my journey in working out, first, how to write a script and, second, how to write a script better. One of the first academic screenwriting researchers, Steven Price, points out that in the early days Hollywood screenwriters were bound by confidentiality agreements and could not tell the reasons behind their creative decisions and the story’s development (Price 2017, 325). He notes: a paradox of script development is that the very things that make it academically problematic—the reliance on single sourced or unsourced anecdotes, the first-person narrative, the recounting of verbal dialogues—are the very things that allow it to reveal aspects of the production process that remain hidden from the researcher pursuing purely text-based materials. For example, much of script development depends not on the marginalia and ephemera of script notes but on the oral transmission of knowledge, advice, and exchange within the Hollywood film studios since the 1910’s. (Price 2017, 326)

Price’s observation that script development has really been a secret process is also supported by leading Australian script development researchers Craig Batty and his colleagues, Staci Taylor, Louise Sawtell, and Bridget Conor, who emphasize that research into the individual “writer in the project”, during the first stages of writing the screenplay before it is shown to others, has not “received sustained attention … partly because it is a process often veiled and mysterious… sustained and agonizing (the ‘development hell’ version); or simply personal, private, difficult to account for and articulate” (Batty et al. 2017, 220).

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In their easy-to-read academic article published in the official academic screenwriting journal, the Journal of Screenwriting, Batty and his colleagues question the different ways that people have thought about script development. They surveyed what had been written and published in academic journals and texts, as well as the “how to manuals” of scriptwriting gurus like Syd Field, Robert McKee, and Linda Aronson, the demands of studio executives and funding bodies, and the practice of individuals and creative practice researchers in the academy (2017, 241–242). They found out that the research about script development up until then was new and exciting, saying: The literature on script development—whether explicit in its focus or implicitly referring to its practice—is wide, varied, and multi-faceted; and … arguably fragile and still emerging. (2017, 240)

Academic research has also highlighted that the often-messy ways that screenwriters work are useful and valid and that there is no need to apologize for how you work. The bottom line is that script development happens in many ways, including, for example, personal journaling, the feedback of trusted colleagues, readers and mentor’s reports, improvisations with actors, and intensive face-to-face script development workshops. Craig Batty and his fellow researchers also highlight the facet of script development that involves the individual and their negotiations with self in the development of ideas that may take many forms. They note that considerations of plot, character, story, theme, and emotional impact are paramount, but they also question “what development actually entails: which aspects of screenwriting craft beyond plot are used in/by/for script development, and what tools are used to achieve this?” (2017, 228). They survey alternate modes of screenwriting practice including Kathryn Millard’s belief that rather than formats that suit an industrial template “Your script can be a map, sketches, photo-texts, a wiki, a list of scenes that form part of a jigsaw, a graphic novel, a video trailer, a short film— whatever works” (2014 in Batty et al. 2017, 235), as well as filmmaker Margot Nash’s book chapter, “Developing the screenplay: Stepping into the unknown” (2014), which argues for a process that embraces uncertainty and “the mysterious and often messy process where ideas need time to ferment” (2014 in Batty et al. 2017, 235). The idea that screenwriting is an individual way of working is underlined by the Australian government’s important screen development body,

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Screen Australia, in their development notes for writers. Screen Australia advises writers to develop a bespoke approach to story development to keep the story alive and moving. They emphasize that such work involves “art, craft and heart”: Creative story development involves art, craft and heart. It’s a process that needs to be flexible and responsive, embracing a diversity of tools and approaches that will enrich and focus creative vision at the heart of a story so audiences will be engaged and entertained … We encourage you to design a bespoke approach to development that will keep the project’s momentum up, its purpose alive and its audience in clear view. (2017  in Batty et al. 2017, 239)

In this book, I understand the work of the individual “writer in the project” at the stage of the writing of the first draft to be script development—whether with or without collaboration with others. I encourage you to take what you want from this book and develop your own “bespoke” process, to “embrace a variety of tools” which in will involve “art, craft and heart”.

Creativity is out There! Contrary to what I thought when I was a student, creativity is not an intangible gift that is the province of talented artists and writers—it is something we can learn. I believe we can all be creative no matter what way the need to write is framed. Once the need to write has been engendered, whether spontaneously or whether carefully stage managed, we can develop our creativity by learning to take the risk, to be brave, to uncover thoughts, ideas, and questions based in our reality by knowing the steps of the creative process. It may seem to be stating the obvious that it is important for us as screenwriters to understand and to learn our craft, but also to understand how we can be more creative as we use this craft, so that we can learn to write new, unique, and innovative (the essential definition of creativity) stories as an integral part of the process. Not true as we will see below. Creativity is often regarded as a nebulous, intangible “thing” that happens at random. When I started to research creativity as an important but distinct part of writing, I kept finding that everyone was talking about how great

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creativity was and how important it was to our economy, but nobody was saying exactly what it was and how it could be worked on to create new and unique work. The idea of creativity has ranged from the nebulous to the nail it down in concrete. A quick journey through history as to how writers and artists have conceived of creativity illustrates this. The Ancient Greeks regarded the Muses as the source of inspiration for the arts and the artist as the channel for creativity as inspiration. But in fact one Ancient Greek, our friend Aristotle, was very careful to note that to tell a story one needed craft as well as inspiration. On the other hand, the leading artists of the Renaissance, Michelangelo, and Leonardo Da Vinci learnt how to be creative because they initially practised their craft as the apprentices of a master. Like the Ancient Greeks, the Romantic Poets also acknowledged the dual processes of craft and creativity and delved deeply into the key aspects of the creative process in their writing, including into inspiration. William Coleridge wrote widely on the active and creative power of the “shaping spirit of the imagination” (Stauffer 1951, xviii). In The Biograhia Literaria, Coleridge reflects on the imaginative and craft facets of writing and proposed “that fancy and imagination were two distinct and widely different faculties”. But he also strongly believed that creativity and imagination could be enhanced by “opiates” real and intangible, which included “conversations with friends, metaphysical philosophy, enchanted daydreaming, and meditations on the infinite”. Scholars of Romantic Poetry have interpreted Coleridge’s belief that while imagination and fancy were part of inspiration and writing, imagination provided the unifying power of poetry, and fancy was responsible for the organizing power: “Imagination modifies its materials because it organizes them into unity, and they have to be adapted to each other and to the total poetic effect … Any operation not characteristic of the power to transform or to unify is attributed to Fancy” (Hardy 1951, 337). More recently, creativity has been seen as a vital part of the creative economy, and key theorists in the field of psychology and the creative industries who write about creativity from the perspective of innovation, have emerged. For example, the theories of renown psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1996) are based on a systems approach which incorporates “flow” and proposes creativity as part of a system that recognizes the creative output as a tangible cultural, social, or economic product with “symbolic rules and procedures”, acknowledged as making a major contribution to the system. Creativity is “any act, idea, or product that changes an existing domain, or that transforms an existing domain into a new one”

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(Csikszentmihalyi 1996, 28). Richard Florida in The Rise of the Creative Class proposes that creativity is a driving force for change in society and the creative economy: “The creative impulse—the attribute that distinguishes us, as humans, from other species—is now being let loose on an unprecedented scale” (2003, 4). However, it must be noted that while these conceptions of creativity are useful for discussions of creativity as part of the system in a creative industries approach to creativity, they do not consider creativity from the perspective of the tangible process of how to be creative. In the more popular press, creativity author William Gompertz writes of the process of the juxtaposition of random and opposite thoughts during the creative process involving the making of new connections in the brain via a process of disruption (Gompertz 2015, 80). He cites American psychiatrist Albert Rothenberg’s work in the study of creativity in humans and his idea of “homospatial thinking”, which Rothenberg describes as “actively conceiving two or more discrete identities occupying the same space, a conception leading to the articulation of new identities” (Rothenberg in Gompertz 2015, 80). One of the key authors who does write about creativity in the artistic domain is Betty Edwards, who in her seminal text, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (1979), explores the intangible process of creativity linked with left-brain/right-brain theories of thinking, where the left brain is deemed responsible for logical thinking and the right brain is responsible for creative thinking. This is an idea that continues to go in and out of vogue so later we will see what the scientists say, and you can make your own minds up whether this concept is helpful for you. Edwards proposes: Creativity is the ability to find new solutions to a problem or new modes of expression […] My aim is to provide the means for releasing that potential, for gaining access at a conscious level to your inventive, intuitive, imaginative powers that may have been largely untapped by our verbal, technological culture, and educational system. (1979, 5)

A more “intuitive” or spiritual approach to creativity is conceptualized by Julia Cameron in her Creativity handbook, The Artist’s Way (1992): Creativity is God [sic]energy flowing through us, shaped by us, like light flowing through a crystal prism. When we are clear about who we are and what we are doing, the energy flows freely and we experience no strain. (1992, 163)

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In her later book, The Vein of Gold: A Journey to Your Creative Heart (1996), Cameron postulates, “Creativity is a spiritual process, one in which we speak of ‘inspiration’” (1996, 27). While these concepts and definitions offer differing insights into what creativity is, as either the part of a system of innovation, as a right-brain activity, as a creative thinking skill, or as “God energy”, they fail to address the central precepts of creativity: Why would we want to create and from where does creativity come? Is it inspiration? Genius? A gift from the Gods? Or is it just plain hard work? So, the jury is out on where creativity comes from. But the jury is in on the interrelationship between creativity and craft as a dynamic part of the creative process. I think this is no more beautifully summed up than in the thoughts of one of my screenwriting students at Griffith Film School who says:  “craft and creativity navigate together in the writing process” (Student 1, 2019).

Creativity is in Here Returning to a bit of academic theory for a moment, I really like what screenwriting researchers and teachers Craig Batty and Sarah Waldeback say. They note “Writers are often faced with the question, ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ While working with screenwriters and students, time and time again we have witnessed the birthing of ideas and there is never one size fits all. What is of more concern is when there appears to be no discipline or awareness applied to the creative process” (Batty and Waldeback 2019, 155). They go on to say: within traditional screenwriting training, there is generally a lack of focus on creativity and a tendency to approach it from a ‘mechanical’ viewpoint. In fact, much craft and [sic] creativity is needed when sourcing ideas, and it is important for writers to acknowledge that their task is not just to type script pages but also to expand their creative territory—to daydream, observe situations, explore human psychology, and allow time for an idea to breathe, percolate and simmer. The life of a writer is not simply to put words on a page but to create space for stories to emerge and to be open to inspiration and dive deep into research. (2019, 155)

Batty and Waldeback (2019, 156) also assert that “Creative thinking and idea manufacturing is not something writers should wait for until

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inspiration strikes—they are skills that can be trained and honed as much as character work or visual storytelling”. They note the dearth of books about creativity and screenwriting and suggest that of all the books in the screenwriting canon, Linda Seger’s Making a Good Writer Great is one of the few that actively addresses the creative process (Batty and Waldeback 2019, 157). In addition,  they offer their earlier book, The Creative Screenwriter: Exercises to Expand Your Craft (2012), as a means of addressing the lack of consideration of the creative process in the teaching of screenwriting (Batty and Waldeback 2019, 156). They note: creative exercises can help during many different phases of the process, to sharpen up technique and strengthen confidence, as well as make writers more aware and help them interact with the world as a writer should: attentive and curious, constantly looking, listening, and feeling. It is crucial for screenwriters wishing to sustain a career to think creatively as well as craft, and actively train themselves in this. Inspiration does not just strike; it can be invited as a regular guest and become a very good friend if one is prepared to work for it. (Batty and Waldeback 2019, 158–159)

To this end, Batty and Waldeback also re-cite their manifesto for creative screenwriting, which includes advice to train and improve craft, maintaining a daily creative workout to encourage inspiration and the development of ideas and using free-standing exercises to help deal with script development. They suggest that “taking time out from going around in circles with your story problems and dipping into an exercise can work wonders. Suddenly you find an idea, see how to solve a dilemma in the script, or feel reinspired and want to get your teeth back into the screenplay” (Batty and Waldeback 2012, 5  in Batty and Waldeback 2019, 156). As a screenwriter and screenwriting teacher, I knew that there were aspects of the creative process that worked for me and my students—finding the feeling, finding the tone, finding the central metaphor—but I didn’t don’t know why. I knew that screenwriting “creativity” exercises worked at random times—things like stream of consciousness writing or sitting in café’s eavesdropping on people’s conversations to get ideas—but again I didn’t know why. In the screenwriting world, it’s a bit of a hit and miss with exercises like these that sometimes work and sometimes don’t. So I thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if we knew why exercises work so we can do more of what works on demand?”

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When I was first impelled to study creativity and the creative process, it was to the field of cognitive psychology (the study of how the brain works when it is thinking) and cognitive neuroscience (the study of what the brain is doing when it is thinking as shown by brain scanning technologies like the MRI) because this is where I figured the most interesting and relevant work to me as a writer and teacher or writing was happening, and this was also where I could find out the “why” of what was happening as I wrote and created, as I figured it was based on scientific research. I have read much  creativity research from cognitive psychology and neuroscience in my search to help my students write more creatively. There is a lot of laboratory testing and research around creativity as it could apply to writing in general and some on screenwriting specifically, but as noted in Samira Bourgeois-Bougrine and Vlad Glaveanu’s study specifically about psychology and  screenwriting, “Collaborative Screenwriting: Social Factors and Psychological Factors”, the literature on screenplay writing in psychology is scarce (2018, 124). I suppose I am lucky that because I was a smart student at high school and even though my heart lay with writing and art, I was buttonholed into doing higher-­ level maths and physics and chemistry—subjects I did well at but disliked. Now I appreciate how they have held me in good stead as I read scientific research from cognitive psychology and neuroscience and apply it to the domain of screenwriting. In the long run in this book, I contend that if we look at the field of creativity studies from cognitive psychology and neuroscience, we can gain insight into why certain aspects of the creative process of screenwriting work for us so we can do more of what works when we want.

The C’s of Creativity So first let’s understand what we mean by “creativity” according to cognitive psychology and neuroscience, where creativity is a field of study all by itself. One of the most comprehensive definitions that applies to all fields of creative endeavor is referred to as “the ability to produce ideas, actions, or outcomes that are novel and original but also meaningful, relevant and valuable in their context” (Runco and Jaeger 2012 in Mastria et al. 2018, 3). Creativity is something that is novel (i.e., original, unexpected), high in quality, and appropriate (i.e., useful, meets task constraints) (Sternberg and Lubart 1999, 3).

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It is this fact, that creativity involves creating something new, different, and unique in a specific field that has specific parameters (like scriptwriting involves plot, character, a screenplay format, etc., or music involves instruments and performances and a music score), which is of interest to us. But the definition above is about creativity as creative output. There is another part of the equation. Creativity as creative input. So first let’s understand what is going on in the brain—the creative process—as we create something new including writing and, where relevant, other artistic fields. I have to be honest with you. This seems like a lot of information to take on board. It has taken me a long time to distill the findings from my work with students, my knowledge and practice of screenwriting craft, and the proven findings I have researched from cognitive psychology and neuroscience that show how we can understand the creative process. To do this in a metacognitive way, so that in our work as a writer we can be more original and more focused, is the aim of this book. Also let’s face it. Writing takes a long time. It may be your job, or it may be your hobby, so if you can be more effective in your use of time and energy, as well as be more creative at the same time, it is a win-win!

Working Out Your Creative Process One thing more. Before we go further, there is a key element missing to scaffold practicing creativity and craft together. This is a model of the creative process that applies to the various stages of screenwriting from the first moment you get an idea for your screenplay, until the last moment when you share your screenplay as a finished work, whether this be with a script editor, a filmmaking colleague, or as a piece of assessment. Most models of the creative process address the steps of inspiration, preparation, research, contemplation, craft, and editing and place importance on various stages. In “Models of the Creative Process: Past, Present and Future” (2001), Todd Lubart outlines a four-stage process of creativity dating to Wallas’ (1926) model of preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. Taking into account the above research and building on psychologist Anne Paris’ practice-based work in Standing at Water’s Edge (2008), I have developed the following model of the  creative process (McVeigh 2014, 2016, 2019, 2020; McVeigh in McVeigh et al. 2023, 5), which I use to scaffold my discussion of the creative process in this book as well as

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in my teaching. This includes the first and final steps often absent from the literature. In essence, these are an integral part of finding the reason to create—the first step includes “envisioning” and the final step—“shaping and sharing”—the connection with an audience, the reason why we want to write in the first place. It must be noted that the steps I outline in this model may or may not flow in a chronological order and may be revisited during the writing process. In considering the development of the first draft of a screenplay, it must be emphasized that screenwriting is an iterative process developing a story from ideas, characters, themes, and research. Kerrigan and Batty also identify the screenwriting process as an integral part of the creative and systemic process of filmmaking by referencing creativity researchers, Wallas (1976), Bastick (1982), and Csikszentmihalyi (1996), to situate screenwriting as part of iterative and recursive creative processes (Kerrigan and Batty 2016, 137). Here is the model of the creative process I am going to use in this book to scaffold our thinking and writing. It is based on creativity research I have been doing and publications I have been writing since 2014.

The Creative Process • Inspiration and Envisioning • Research and Insight • Writing and Flow • Shaping and Sharing (McVeigh 2020, McVeigh in McVeigh et al. 2023, 5) You should know that this is not a model set in concrete; everyone must choose the process that works best for them, and sometimes this process will change depending on the project. However, it is interesting, I think, to know how other people work so you can choose what works for you. In the research, the researchers have used various categories to present the steps in the creative process of screenwriting. In the field of cognitive psychology as opposed to the field of screenwriting as creative practice, there is a core but recent body of scientific-­ based laboratory testing and research around creativity and the arts including writing. Some applies to writing in general and some to screenwriting specifically, but as previously noted in Samira Bourgeois-Bougrine and Vlad Glaveanu’s 2018 study, there is not a lot out there about

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screenplay writing in psychology (2018, 124). In this seminal article, well known in the field of cognitive psychology but little known in the field of screenwriting as creative practice (this is what is called siloing of knowledge; bringing together these silos is what we are doing in this book), Bourgeois-­Bougrine and Glaveanu interviewed a group of six scriptwriting and filmmaking students who learnt the process of writing a script in a period of eight weeks (2018, 124). They found the screenwriting creative process to be one of “impregnation, planning for action or structuring and production or the cycle of writing and rewriting the actual script” (2018, 132). I am not so sure about the inspiration stage being termed “impregnation” but you get the vibe! Also, of interest to us here is that in the second part of the study, Bourgeois-Bougrine and Glaveanu investigated the psychological processes six student screenwriters make reference to during each stage of screenwriting, during the eight weeks they were given to write a screenplay. In this study, students were asked to complete a weekly self-report about the stages of the creative process outlined above and associated social factors in a scenario that involved much collaboration during the first three weeks of development. Thirteen more discrete steps in the creative process were included: “definition of the problem; documentation; consideration of the restraints; insight; association or associative thinking; experimentation; exploration, insight; assessment; structuration; the chance benefit; realisation or implementation; finalisation; and taking a break” (Bourgeois-Bougrine and Glaveanu (2018, 141)). We will be looking at these more detailed steps of each stage at the relevant stage of the creative process  outlined above as we progress through the chapters of this book. Elsewhere, cognitive psychologists Vlad Glaveanu, Todd Lubart, Nathalie Bonnardel, Marion Botella, and their colleagues, in their research with artists including screenwriters, in the great article “Creativity as Action: findings from five creative domains” (2013), note the that dominant models of creativity for the most part are cognitive models of creativity (excluding Glaveneau et al. 2013, 1), and thus do not provide an action framework for creativity which engages with the “social and material” aspects of creativity and thus fail to explore both the “‘internal’ and ‘external’ facets of creative expression” (Glaveanu et al. 2013, 1). This action framework of more specific steps combined with the stages of the creative process again is the work of this book and is outlined below. Why am I telling you this? So, you will understand where we are coming from and

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the simple fact that even though all this great research exists, it has not been bought together before. So, in this book it is new and useful in the screenwriting domain (does this remind you of the definition of creativity?). Also of interest to us is the fact that in this research Glaveanu and his colleagues sought to investigate insights which would contribute to “domain specific ways of stimulating creative expression” using an action model of human experience “impulsion, obstacle, doing, undergoing, emotion” (Glaveanu et al. 2013, 2) to situate their findings and provide a contextual theoretical and methodological tool which “reunites the psychological and behavioural aspects of creativity with its material and social effects” (Glaveanu et al. 2013, 13). There are some takeaways for us here as we start to think about the stages of the creative process, so I am going to unpack them as they are relevant to our thinking in this book. “Knowing about the stages of doing in particular domains can help us structure our teaching of artistic and scientific disciplines and make good use of those material and social conditions that facilitate creative expression” (Glaveanu et al. 2013, 13). In the screenwriting domain specifically, Glaveanu and his fellow researchers found that unlike art and closer to science, scriptwriting requires a certain discipline and the need for a time and place for work tends to be well established. They found that successful screenwriters like to work almost daily and for at least three hours, including in some sort of place they called an office. The fact that they committed three hours to writing left space for other routines which they found helpful, for example writing in cafes. These writers also said that they learnt the stages of writing as part of learning the craft. These include working on the seed idea whether it be self-generated or from a client or other creative. The stages of the creative process for these screenwriters include research which involved interviewing people and reading or watching documentaries relevant to the idea, as well as on the ground research. Then some planned what they would write or some just wrote intensely, sometimes going back to do more research to elaborate. Then came the editing stage which included much rewriting (Glaveanu et al. 2013, 9). The researchers also uncovered things that writers found helpful, what they called “the tricks of the trade”, including the following: writing a personal diary for the main characters (L1), or simply a narrative in first person (L2). Always having a notebook with you and taking a lot of

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notes is a requirement as well as taking regular breaks from the script to gain some detachment (L3). Working materials are relatively few in this case, primarily notebooks and the computer (L1). Interestingly, some love to write by hand (L7) and use the computer just for later transcribing or corrections (L10), whereas others put down on paper only the general plan (L9, L11). (Glaveanu et al. 2013, 9)

In my scriptwriting courses, I acknowledge and use findings from this and other cognitive psychology as well as cognitive neuroscientific research to set myself up as a Creativity Coach. I run what I call a Creativity Workshop for Screenwriting as part of my courses where I integrate what we learn about the craft of screenwriting with what we do, as we learn how to be more creative. I scaffold this workshop with the stages of the creative process outlined above. As for the outcomes of the iterations of the workshop, students are asked to anonymously evaluate the course. Feedback has always been positive. This is what one said: Dear Scriptwriting Student Pay attention in every moment. Come to every class and absorb everything—don’t simply listen. Leave your preconceptions of yourself at the door and open yourself to opportunities of exploration. Not only are you learning you are nurturing and nourishing your creative self. Soak it all in. Love, Current Student xx (Student H 2016 in McVeigh 2016, 10)

It has been apparent that students welcome the opportunity to reflect upon and value their own unique creative process and be aware that at times their brain may we working in left-brain or right-brain mode or whatever theory we are using. Probably, most of all, they found validation in psychologist Anne Paris’ assertion that one must recognize and give time to all aspects of the creative process including “completing tasks extraneous to the project” (2008, 148), like spring-cleaning, listening to music, taking the dog for a walk—anything but writing! But what exactly is missing? Where does this leave us as screenwriters who seek and want ideas about how to be creative while honing our craft? We know that it is important, but the answers are not in the books I have surveyed to this point. As I have said before, I have found the answers in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. It seems simple when you look at the research from strangely enough another field that is so rich with information but not applied in practice.

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Before we launch into our journey let’s start with how we intend to go on. Being creative and having a go at one of the three activities from the “What If? section of this chapter!

What If? 1. Morning Pages Let’s start your journey now. Julia Cameron in her great creativity breakthrough book, The Artists Way (1992, 9–18), asks readers to start the day journaling. What she calls writing your “Morning Pages”. In her book as part of creative recovery for people experiencing writer’s block, she suggests that you write your morning pages for a period of six weeks. I like to think that there is no such thing as writer’s block once we have mastered the creative process, but I do think Morning Pages and journaling first thing, either when you get up or when you sit down to write for the day, are a positive and important step in being a writer. Here is my version of Morning Pages. First have a book that you take pleasure in writing in as your journal. Make it your own. Either collage the cover or buy a beautiful bound leather book. Or maybe a pink book—whatever your favorite color is. Or just a spirax lecture pad that you can bind (this is what I do). Then first thing when you get up or when you sit down to write for the day, write uninterrupted stream of consciousness for 20 minutes. I find when I do this, that is, when I first dump all the procedural stuff of life (like I have to remember to pay the electricity bill or take the cat to the vet), then I start writing about how I feel about what is happening in my life, then comes the ideas that I am working on in my writing projects. It is sort of like uncluttering or dumping extraneous stuff from your brain so you can then mine the gold. Now here is the next step, and you can choose what works for you. Cameron suggests in the period of six-week creative recovery that you do not go back and reread what you have written the day before. Actually I find this super powerful because I can forget anything that negatively impacts my work, and I always remember those gems. But you choose what works for you. Some of you may like to reread what you have written and extract some fabulous phrases or ideas you didn’t even know you had. It is your choice.

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2. Introduce Yourself: Nothing You Say Can Be True This is one of the greatest exercises I have done to prove to ourselves that we are all innately creative. This was the fun exercise I encountered in my very  first script development workshop run by Screen Queensland’s then film development cooperative, QPIX. A group of eight of us were selected from an open call to be mentored by a script development consultant to write the first draft of a feature film. None of us knew each other. The first thing our workshop leader asked us to do was introduce ourselves to the group. The proviso was that nothing we said could be true! We were given a couple of minutes to think about what we would say then we were off! What fun and outrageous people inhabited that room. To this day I do not know if what some of my fellow workshop writers said was true, but it was certainly intriguing. This exercise does two things. It taps into your subconscious and frees up thought. Most of all, it is a safe way of taking a risk as you can pretend that you can do or have done anything, and no one is the wiser. Probably, just as importantly, it reveals to yourself that you have the ability to tell amazing and outrageous stories. Stories that are original and unique and are just lurking down there in deep-term memory waiting to be activated by the demands of the short term memory led task to hand! If you are in a class, you may introduce yourself to other classmates. If you are working through this book alone, maybe you would like to do this activity with friends or family or just record yourself on your phone and play back what you have said. Just relax and have fun and see what happens. I guarantee you will be surprised by the thoughts you did not even know you had. So now. Introduce yourself. But there is a proviso. Nothing you say can be true … 3. Take Yourself on an Artist’s Date Another great creative activity to fill your creative well of possibility is again suggested by Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way (1992, 18–24). It is simple and fun and full of possibility. For one hour each week, take yourself on an artist’s date. No one can be with you. It can be anywhere or anything you like to do. When I did the six-week creative course, as suggested by Cameron in the book, each week I would go to a place I loved. An antique shop. A walk by the beach. A beautiful café with a Vogue magazine to read. I always found something new or unusual to intrigue me, or

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captured a tone or atmosphere I wanted to re-create in my writing. Find the place where you want to take yourself on your date. Fill your creative well!

References Aristotle. Poetics. Translated by S.H.  Butcher. Accessed May 2, 2023. https:// www.gutenberg.org/files/1974/1974-­h/1974-­h.htm#link2H_4_0002. Aronson, Linda. 2000. Scriptwriting Updated: New and Conventional Ways of Writing for the Screen. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Batty, Craig, Staci Taylor, Louise Sawtell, and Bridget Conor. 2017. Script Development: Defining the Field. Journal of Screenwriting 8 (3): 225–247. Bourgeois-Bougrine, Samira, and Vlad Glaveanu. 2018. Collaborative Screenwriting: Social Factors and Psychological Factors. In The Creative Process: Perspectives from Multiple Domains, Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture, ed. Todd Lubart. Palgrave Macmillan. Bourgeois-Bougrine, Samira, Vlad Glaveanu, Marion Botella, K. Guillou, P.M. de Biasi, and Todd Lubart. 2014. The Creativity Maze: Exploring Creativity in Screenplay Writing. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 8 (4): 384–399. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0037839. Cameron, Julia. 1992. The Artist’s Way. London, UK: Souvenir Press, Pan Books. ———. 1996. The Vein of Gold: A Journey to Your Creative Heart. Jeremy P. Tarcher, Penguin Putnam Inc. Cooper, Dona. 1997. Writing Great Screenplays for Film and TV. New  York: Macmillan. Craig Batty, and Zara Waldeback. 2012. The Creative Screenwriter: Exercises to Expand Your Craft. UK: Bloomsbury. ———. 2019. Writing for the Screen: Creative and Critical Approaches (2 edition). Red Globe Press. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. 1996. Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. New York: HarperCollins. Edwards, Betty. 1979. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher Inc. Field, Syd. 1979. Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting. New  York: Dell Publishing. Florida, Richard. 2003. The Rise of the Creative Class. North Melbourne, Australia: Pluto Press. Froug, William. 1996. Zen and the Art of Screenwriting—Insights and Interviews. Los Angeles: Sillman-James. Glaveanu, Vlad, Todd Lubart, Nathalie Bonnardel, Marion Botella, P-M. de Biaisi, M. Desainte-Catherine, A. Georgsdottir, K. Guillou, G. Kurtag, C. Mouchiroud,

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M. Storme, A. Wojtczuk, and F. Zenasni. 2013. Creativity as Action: Findings from Five Creative Domains. Frontiers in Psychology 4: 1–14, Article 176. April. Gompertz, Will. 2015. Think Like an Artist. London, UK: Penguin Books. Hardy, Barbara. 1951. Distinction Without Difference: Coleridge’s Fancy and Imagination. Essays in Criticism I (4, Oct.): 336–344. https://doi. org/10.1093/eic/I.4.336. Kallas, Christina. 2010. Creative Screenwriting Understanding Emotional Structure. Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Karwowski, Maciej, and I.  Lebuda. 2016. The Big Five, the Huge Two, and Creative Self-Beliefs: A Meta-Analysis. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts 10 (2): 214–232. Kerrigan, Susan, and Batty, Craig. 2016. Re-conceptualising screenwriting for the academy: the social, cultural and creative practice of developing a screenplay. New Writing. The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing 13 (1): Screenwriting in the Academy. 130–144. Lubart, Todd. 2001. Models of the Creative Process: Past, Present and Future. Creativity Research Journal 13 (3–4): 295–308. ———, ed. 2018. The Creative Process: Perspectives from Multiple Domains. Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan. Mastria, Serena, Agnoli, Sergio, Zanon, Marco, Lubart, Todd and Corazza, Giovanni Emanuele. 2018. “Creative Brain Creative Mind Creative Person” in Zoe Kapoula, ed. et  al., Exploring Transdisciplinarity in Art and Sciences, Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-­3-­319-­76054-­4_1 McGrath, Declan, and Felim MacDermott, eds. 2003. Screencraft: Screenwriting. Switzerland: Rotovision. McKee, Robert. 1999. Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. London: Methuen. McVeigh, Margaret. 2009. Mosaic Narrative: A Poetics of New Media Narrative. PhD thesis. USQ eprints: University of Southern Qld. https://eprints.usq. edu.au/6235/1/McVeigh_2008_front.pdf. ———. 2014. Can Creativity be Taught? Screen Education, ATOM (Australian Teachers of Media), Issue 75, Spring: 56–63. ———. 2016. “Finding the Lightbulb Moment: Creativity& Inspiration in the teaching of the Craft of Screenwriting”. ASPERA http://aspera.org. au/research/ ———. 2016. Interview with Student A. Script 2 Summer Semester 2016, Griffith Film School. 20 January 2016. ———. 2019. “Work-in-progress: The Writing of Shortchanged” in The Palgrave Handbook of Screen Production. eds. Batty, Craig; Berry, Marsha; Dooley, Kath; Frankham, Bettina & Kerrigan, Susan. Palgrave Macmillan. 157–168.

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———. 2020. “Creativity and Creative Practice: Towards A Meta-­ Cognitive Domain Specific Framework for Writing and Making for the Screen”. MIC Creativity Conference, Marconi Institute of Creativity, Bologna Italy 14–19 Sept 2020. Unpublished conference paper. McVeigh, Margaret, Valquaresma, Andreia, and Karwowski, Maciej. 2023. “Fostering Creative Agency through Screenwriting: An Intervention” Creativity Research Journal. Taylor & Francis. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 10400419.2023.2168341 Paris, Anne. 2008. Standing at Water’s Edge. New World Library. Price, S. 2017. Script Development and Academic Research. Journal of Screenwriting 8 (3): 319–333. Screen Australia. 2016. What is a Synopsis? An Outline? A Treatment? http:// www.screenaustralia.gov.au/getmedia/d4e1476e-­33e5-­4aad-­b9d9-96968 19b4b98/whatisasynopsis.pdf. Seger, Linda. 1994. Making a Good Script Great. 2nd ed. New  York: Dodd Mead & Co. Shindo, Kinto. 2003. Screencraft: Screenwriting. Edited by Declan McGrath and Felim MacDermott, 92–93. Switzerland: Rotovision SA. Stauffer, Donald. 1951. Selected Poetry and Prose of Coleridge. New York: Random House Inc. Sternberg, Robert J., and Todd I.  Lubart. 1999. The Concept of Creativity: Prospects and Paradigms. In Handbook of Creativity, ed. Robert Sternberg. Cambridge University Press. Student 1. 2019. Griffith Film School, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia. Synder, Blake. 2005. Save the Cat. Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions. Woolf, Virginia. 1927. To the Lighthouse @ Project Gutenberg Australia. Accessed May 2, 2023. http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100101h.html ———. 1928. A Room of One’s Own. UK: Penguin Modern Classics. Zaillian, Steven. 2003. Screencraft: Screenwriting. Edited by Declan McGrath and Felim MacDermott, 38–52. Switzerland: Rotovision SA.

CHAPTER 3

How do Creatives Think?

Abstract  This chapter addresses the fundamental question facing all screenwriters at any stage of the creative process—“What will I write?” It draws upon and distills key creativity research into screenwriting and other artistic practices, including art and music, from cognitive psychology and neuroscience, to investigate what is happening in our brain and propose a way of understanding how we think when we generate ideas for new work. The chapter considers how laboratory-based and brain research technology has enabled new insights into how the brain works to create ideas through the processes of divergent and convergent thinking, association and evaluation. It aligns and applies research from the laboratory to the creative process in the domain of screenwriting particularly around the central screenwriting concept of “the screen idea” as the basis to investigate creativity and screenwriting through the various key stages of developing a screenplay. The work of the chapter is encapsulated under the framework heading “Work in Progress” which crystallizes the relevant stage of thinking and writing like a creative. The “Creative Process Stage” explores key creativity theory and the “Craft Stage” backgrounds key screenwriting theory. The “What If?” section of the chapter is a

Work in Progress Creative Process Stage: Creative Thinking Craft Stage: The Screen Idea © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. McVeigh, Screenwriting from the Inside Out, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40520-4_3

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concluding coda of three activities for thinking and writing like a creative, drawn from the ideas developed in the chapter. Keywords  Screenwriting • Creativity • Creative process • Divergent thinking • Convergent thinking An idea is a thought. It’s a thought that holds more than you think it does when you receive it. But in that first moment there is a spark. In a comic strip, if someone gets an idea, a lightbulb goes on. It happens in an instant just as in life… It would be great if the entire film came all at once. But it comes for me, in fragments. The first fragment is like the Rosetta Stone… You fall in love with the first idea, that little, tiny piece. And once you’ve got it, the rest will come in time. (David Lynch. Catching the Big Fish. 2007: 23)

Where Do Ideas Come From? Images. Music. Slogans. Snippets of conversation. Characters in the street. Mythic stories. The list is continual and endless. Like the great avant-­ garde film director, screenwriter, and creativity advocate David Lynch, for many of us ideas come in fragments, and they may come on command or seemingly out of the blue. Anything can trigger the impulse to write. There are just so many ideas out there. The big problem is sorting through the maelstrom of ideas to focus on what inspires you for the project in hand. David Lynch suggests in his treatise about Creativity, Catching the Big Fish (2007), that the notion of “getting” the idea is like a spark, a lightbulb moment. He also reminds us that once the writer commits to this idea, it takes the work of craft to develop a screenplay. It is relatively easy to have an idea but knowing how to bring them on when you want and how to get more ideas can be a random thing. No matter what we may learn from accomplished teachers, screenwriters, and filmmakers about getting ideas, sometimes what we try will work and sometimes it won’t. The work of this book is to help you to understand why certain ways of thinking work—maybe sometimes, maybe all the time—for yourself and for other people. We know things like being a bowerbird, and using ideas collected from life and art works to generate ideas, but we often don’t have control over the process. We know that screenwriting “creativity” exercises work at

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random times but again we don’t know why. In the screenwriting world, it’s a bit of a hit-and-miss with exercises that sometimes work and sometimes don’t. Wouldn’t it be great if we knew why exercises work so we can do more of what works on demand? This is where we turn to cognitive psychology and neuroscience laboratory research for a deeper understanding. As I contend as the basis of this book, if we look at the field of creativity studies from cognitive psychology and neuroscience, we can gain insight to why certain aspects of the creative process of screenwriting work for us, so we can do more of what works when we want. In the teaching and practice of screenwriting, there are many exercises that are used to generate ideas. And they work. These include exercises like brainstorming, automatic writing, association games, improvisation, and primary research in the field. While we might not know it, some exercises actually enhance the development of working memory which is essential for creating content and story, some actually target the refinement of craft skills, including, for example, the simple repetition of best practice, and some enhance thinking skills essential to inspiration or idea incubation, including mind wandering and mindfulness so that the mind can make new and unusual associations. Wouldn’t it be great if we could understand why these work so we can do more of the same? As a Creativity Coach in my screenwriting courses and workshops, I ask students to find ideas to write about by, for example, collecting ideas from life and art or eavesdropping into café conversations. We play lots of creativity games around, for example, trust and independent thinking and the chance event. In my 2016 Summer screenwriting course, one student noted: “After the workshop each evening the ideas would not stop coming. There were just so many” (McVeigh, 2016, 8). So, we can all have many and great ideas. But what exactly is missing? Where does this leave us as screenwriters who want to access and seek ideas about how to be creative while honing our craft, working on what one of the first screenwriting as creative practice academic theorists, Ian W. McDonald, termed the concept of “the screen idea”? The screen idea is in essence the central idea driving a work Any notion held by one or more people of a singular concept (however complex), which may have conventional shape or not, intended to become a screenwork, whether or not it is possible to describe it in written form or by other means. (Macdonald 2013, 4–5)

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We know that to approach the question of finding ideas and the screen idea in a considered, academic manner is important, but the answers are not in the screenwriting “how to” books nor are they in the popular press books about creativity. As I have said previously, I have found the answers in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Strangely enough, it seems simple to find the answers  when you look at the research from another field that is so rich with information. But this is the world of scientific experiment, and mostly the results are published in academic journals and texts which are not accessed by creatives.

Getting an Idea To understand how we get an idea, let’s investigate what is going on in the brain as we create something new as found  from the scientific research into writing, and where relevant other artistic fields, including music, painting, poetry, and design. The field of neuroscience gives us images of what the brain is doing while we think but this is only a new thing—like the last two decades in scientific research—so the research is still evolving. What I have distilled in this book is what I have learnt from research to the present day. I think it is interesting (and a bit scary) to consider the ways in which neuroscience can map what the brain is doing as we think. But neuroscience has proved what we already thought—that creativity and creative thinking come from combining the work of different parts of the brain that do different work (Mastria et al. 2016, 6). So let’s have a go at understanding as this gives credibility to what we have previously thought. This will then empower us to take control of our creative thinking so that we may think and write even better. One of the first articles from the field of cognitive psychology and neuroscience that really made sense to me as a screenwriter and a teacher of screening was Serena Mastria, Sergio Agnoli, Marco Zanon, Todd Lubart, and Giovanni Emanuele Corazza’s chapter, “Creative Brain, Creative Mind, Creative Person” (2018). In this chapter, Mastria and her colleagues from the Marconi Institute of Creativity at the University of Bologna in Italy and the University of Paris Descartes in France summarize the results of the many studies conducted on the functioning of the creative mind and how it is manifested in creative behaviors. They present a comprehensive overview of the creativity research (which began over 100 years ago in the laboratory) which up until the time of their research had involved investigations of what creative people are like, including the

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way they think (their cognitive characteristics and actions), their personalities, their motivations, and their emotions and emotional styles. What I like is how they bring this research together by using a model of creativity called the “Multivariate Model”, developed by Sternberg and Lubart (1995) and Sternberg (2005) and further developed by Lubart et  al. (2015), to provide a context for talking about the many variables that are integral to and impact upon the way a creative person thinks. What does this mean? Put simply, there are ways of looking at how the elements that impact our creativity have been looked at in the research. In cognitive psychology research, this includes well known concepts like Big C and Little C Creativity, the 4 P’s, and attributes like the Big Five and the Huge Two (Karwowski and Lebuda 2016)—they all have great things to say and are all relevant but what I like about the Multivariate Model is that it proposes a way to think about the person and the process at the same time. The Multivariate Model (multivariate basically meaning that there are many variables that are considered in the model) is a way of scaffolding research done on creativity to think about how we think. It brings together the key attributes of the creative personality under the person-centered aspects of cognition, conation, and emotion in the relevant environmental context, so we can understand the way our brain works as we think and create. Mastria and her colleagues use the Multivariate Model as a framework to very simply understand what is happening in the overall process of creativity where there are two main modes of thinking and doing. These include the initial exploratory stages of divergent thinking and then the creative work of bringing ideas and craft together in a convergent and integrative way relevant to craft. One of the team, Giovanni Corazza (2020), also reminds us that our level of creativity is dynamic and can change, we can learn to be more creative—good to hear because this is what this book is about! First a bit of backstory so we are all on the same page. Implicit in the Multivariate Model is the work of one of the early researchers in the creativity field, Teresa Amabile. Amabile reminded us in 1996 that there are three underlying components essential to creativity, including motivation (intrinsic and extrinsic), capacity in a field (knowledge, technical abilities, and talents), and skills related to creativity (e.g., a cognitive or thinking style that can cope with complex ideas or the ability to persevere), which all work together and complement each other during the creative process, therefore underlining the fact that each person and situation is different (in Mastria et al. 2016, 4–6). Most interesting for us to think about, is the fact that Amabile is noted for her observation “that the level of a person in

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these three components determines his or her creativity. If one of the components is absent, creativity cannot be exercised” (in Mastria et  al. 2018, 4). This is where the Multivariate Model comes in. Mastria and her fellow researchers remind us that creativity is complex, “person-centered” in its combination of factors including “intellectual abilities, personality traits and emotional styles”, as well as contextually based in the environment in which the “creative” works and lives (Mastria et  al. 2018, 4). The big problem with all this great research, even for experts in studying creativity and for researchers like Mastria and her colleagues, is that there is not a rigorous scientific framework that allows researchers to integrate and interpret all the diverse findings exploring how the brain works during the creative process (Mastria et al. 2018, 6). Again, they are referring to that siloing of knowledge which we are breaking down in this book. Since I came across the Multivariate Model, I have successfully developed it into what I call the Creativity Metacognitve Framework (McVeigh 2020; McVeigh in McVeigh et al. 2023, 5). I use it in my teaching as a Creativity Coach to scaffold how I incrementally build students’ knowledge of creativity and their creative process as they develop their screenwriting craft skills, so, ultimately, they can be more creative in this domain. Here is what some of them have had to say! (It is) Important for writers to understand how the creative process works. I like that I learnt tips and tricks to help with my creative writing. I think it is an essential course that provides understanding within the writing world. Whilst also providing helpful tools that will assist you in your journey. Don’t be afraid to share your stories. Every story is beautiful and unique, every story has a place in this world. (McVeigh, 2016, 3)

In this book, I build on this model and provide a summary of the key points in Chap. 9, where I unpack and detail this framework which can be used by teachers, students, and emerging writers alike to build a plan to develop their creativity.

As We May Think “As We May Think” is a famous essay which the scientist Vannevar Bush (1945) used to foretell the existence of a future device, a machine which could replicate the way humans think. What do you think it was?

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While of course Bush was foretelling the existence of the computer, his question also points to one of the essential aspects of being a human. How do we think? The bottom line is that we don’t actually know all the answers, particularly about creative thinking. Even though we are now going to have a look at creativity research from the laboratories of cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists, this research is ongoing, and it is siloed, fragmented, and often without context as it is experimental. But it is very important and exciting as each experiment can be thought about in terms of the Multivariate Model, which basically means there are many variables that are considered as we start our journey into thinking and writing better! I must note that even though we are going to consider all the components of the creative process individually so we can get a handle on them, it is important to remember that everything works together and that all the experimental data can be related to a part of or parts of the creative process. Creativity is not just an output; it is a process. Creativity is considered to be an ability, which emerges from a dynamic interaction between cognitive, conative, and environmental factors in relation to goal-directed tasks. In other words, the level of “creative potential” of an individual depends on which cognitive (and conative) resources are engaged by the task at hand. (Mastria et al. 2018, 8)

Put simply. What is the person doing? What are they like? What do they know and how is their environment impacting their creative work?

Getting New Ideas So, let’s get to the nitty-gritty. The creative process can itself be described through two main modes of thinking and acting which are complementary. Basically, we all know and do this. The first way of thinking begins with an initial starting point of some kind and leads us to many potential paths. It is expansive and exploratory as we search out and generate the many potential ideas for our work. This is called divergent thinking. The second way of thinking is where we build on what we know and several elements are brought together to create a new work. It is evaluative and integrative. This is called convergent thinking (Mastria et al. 2018, 6). We are going to look at where ideas come from a scientific perspective so we will know which kind of screenwriting exercises will work at the various

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stages of creative thinking, including gathering information on which to base ideas and idea generation, analysis, and evaluation. In the Multivariate Model, we can integrate these ways of thinking and look at what impacts them. In this model, “cognition” refers to the way we think—more or less in a mechanical way. This includes, for example, the way that we generate ideas as we brainstorm. Cognitive psychology researchers Todd Lubart and Frank Zenasni reviewed all the research on idea generation to elegantly summarize five key cognitive and conative resources which they identify in the literature and have based them on the order of their importance (Lubart and Zenasni 2013, 44). In this research, Lubart and Zenasni consider the measuring of a person’s creative potential by using a tool based on assessing the components or resources available for creative work, as part of a person’s creative potential profile. They note that this research, as we generate new ideas, “enables the individual to consider alternative pathways of exploration in problem solving, which increases the probability of finding a rare idea … High fluency is important for creativity because there is a trend for common, socially-­ available ideas to come first and more idiosyncratic, rare, and unusual ideas to come later” (Lubart and Zenasni 2013, 44). So, this gives credence to the idea that as we brainstorm it is good not to self-edit because, as Lubart and Zenasni note, the more ideas we generate, the more likelihood is that we will generate a rare idea. Tied in with the work of idea generation are the different ways that we generate ideas. This helps us understand why creativity exercises that ask us to brainstorm and connect a series of random ideas or objects to make a story can work. This is called associative thinking. Associative thinking “is a fundamental ability to bring together ideas, to make connections” so that in “Being able to find possible associates, in particular ones involving elements that are not commonly connected is facilitated by a rich knowledge base. From this perspective, associations based on personal experiences or emotional traces are particularly relevant for creativity because they are idiosyncratic, unlikely to be suggested by other people.… In contrast, associations based on common, shared-world knowledge have less probability to lead to new ideas” (Lubart and Zenasni 2013, 45). The scientific approach of this research into the way we generate ideas may seem to some a bit cut-and-dried, and the very antithesis to creativity which may appear to be an ephemeral process that happens in the subconscious and is beyond our control! But all is not lost. The researchers

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acknowledge this type of thinking as something that is part of the process. In the research this is called “Intuitive thinking”. Intuition is conceived as a preferred information-processing style. It can be contrasted with the preference for rational thinking (Epstein 1994). Style preferences are distinct from processing ability. Preference for intuition is characterized by focusing on one’s own experience and emotional reactions. This style of thinking accentuates idiosyncratic, personal experienced-based processing as opposed to more logical, rational type of processing. It is expected that logical, rational processing is a more standardized, commonly shared mode that leads to shared ideas. Empirical research suggests that preference for intuitive-thinking style is associated with creative productions. (Lubart and Zenasni 2013, 46)

So, what happens to these ideas when they are generated? We have considered associative thinking and intuitive thinking. This is where the next type of thinking, analytical thinking, comes in. Analytical thinking “is necessary in creative work because it allows ideas to be filtered and evaluated systematically” which “allows strengths and weaknesses of new ideas to be considered, weighed, and isolated” (Lubart and Zenasni 2013, 44). Along with this, a person’s mental flexibility refers to “the capacity to change perspectives, to explore a new direction during problem solving. It is often contrasted with mental rigidity, or fixedness” (Lubart and Zenasni 2013, 45). As we will see later, the attribute of mental flexibility is part of the personality attribute of being open. After this comes “selective combination”, which refers “to the synthesis of disparate elements in new ways” (Lubart and Zenasni) Phew! Now that we have a simple handle on this, let’s consider the workings of the brain behind these key types of thinking that generate and work with ideas during the creative process, so that we can fine-tune the way we think and do more of what works for us. Once we have this understanding, the ways that I propose for you to enhance your creativity in later chapters, by using creativity exercises with a clear knowledge of what is happening in the brain and how and what you do impacts your creative thinking, will make sense. So, let’s add to the above knowledge about the types of thinking we do when creating and see what the latest research from neuroscience says is actually happening in the brain when we think. (I am excited by this as it means that if we understand what our brain is doing, we can work to give it more of what it needs to work better.)

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Getting It Together Over the last two decades, the neuroscientific study of creative behavior has explored the underlying neural structures that operate in the brain, including during creative cognition. It has revealed that creative thinking is driven by basic cerebral interconnections between areas of the brain that have specific functions (Mastria et al. 2018, 6). Yes, in part this is associative thinking, but it is also analytical thinking and evaluation, as we will see below. What is really interesting from our point of view is how Mastria and her fellow researchers explain how to connect research from the field of cognitive neuroscience with the field of cognitive psychology. To the person in the street, who is an expert in neither one of these fields, I would have assumed that research into one field would have been feeding another. This is not the case. To think about this more broadly makes sense. It is like saying that research into the field of say spinal medicine speaks to research into the field of dentistry—both fields study the workings of the human body, but to really break new ground in research, one must spend many years becoming an expert in their field; so, it is not a fait accompli that a research into the spine and dentistry would be integrated! Now for those of you who really like to know the nitty-gritty behind why we are combining cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience in this book, as well as using the Multivariate Model as a framework for our understanding, I want to delve a little more into what Mastria and her colleagues have found. If it is becoming a bit intense to process this information, it is okay to skip over the next few paragraphs with the scientific words and names of brain parts and go to the next section, as I will continue to refer to this working model of what is happening in the brain in later chapters. But to be honest, I think if you can get a handle on what the current research proposes is actually happening and which parts of the brain are working, you will be able to better understand how you can fuel and enhance your creativity. And the names of the parts of the brain in some instances are pretty easy to understand because of their names. Can you guess what the Executive Control Network does for example? Let’s have a look! What gives rigor to psychology and neuroscience is the concept of standardized testing. Two of the main brain imaging techniques used to study what is happening in the brain are electron encephalography (EEG), which measures of electrical signals, and the Functional Magnetic

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Resonance Imaging (fMRI), which measures blood oxygen levels and cerebral blood flow. These tests have given consistent results which reflect each other (Mastria et al. 2018, 7). The fMRI has the advantage of high spatial accuracy, allowing researchers to explore the involvement of specific brain regions and networks in creative behavior at both cortical and subcortical levels. EEG allows fine-grained temporal analyses in brain activation while performing a creative task (Mastria et al. 2018, 7–8). As Mastria and her colleagues note, these studies have suggested that diverse creative tasks share the activation of similar brain regions … and that some specific brain regions are dedicated to distinct kinds of creative thinking processes. In particular, whereas the ability to combine ideas creatively involves rostral brain regions, the free generation of novel ideas engages more posterior brain areas … Similarly, musical, verbal, and visuospatial domains of creativity seem to involve the activation of functionally specialized different brain regions. (Mastria et al. 2018, 7)

More recently, Mastria and her colleagues’ work is supported by neuroscientists Schiavio and Benedek in their work on musical creativity in their 2020 paper, “Dimensions of Musical Creativity”, which employs an interdisciplinary approach (humanities, performance studies, and neuroscience). Like Mastria and her colleagues, Schiavio and Benedek call the thinking processes involved when we create “creative cognition”. They also note that this is still a super new field and that, to date, the information found has not been harnessed for teaching and assert “there is [still] minimal evidence of embodied cognition approaches to creativity research or pedagogical practices for teaching creativity skills” (Schiavio and Benedek 2020, 2). Of interest to us is that Schiavio and Benedek elegantly crystallize the findings of the many decades of creativity research relevant to considering the individual and their process. Like other creativity researchers, they outline the two broad types of creative thinking noted above—creative idea generation (divergent thinking or insight problem-solving) and creative problem-solving (convergent thinking). They also note the empirical approaches that have been deployed to study these processes in laboratory settings including quantitative tools such as the “alternate uses” and open-­ ended tasks. For the former, subjects generate uses for everyday objects, and for the latter subjects provide imaginative solutions to, for example, utopian situations or to produce creative metaphors. In both these

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scenarios, subjects’ outputs may be judged on their fluency or flexibility or via by raters, norms, or statistical frequency. Traditionally, the way in which scientific research has measured the success of the idea generating mode of divergent thinking is through laboratory tests like the Alternate Uses Task (AUT)—think brainstorming how many things you can do with a match in a given time. In this type of laboratory testing, how creative a person is is measured by fluency (number of ideas generated), flexibility (number of different categories), and originality (Mastria et al. 2018, 9). Personally, I freeze and come up with a blank if I am confronted with a test like this, but it does help me understand that why during the brainstorming process it is great to get down as many ideas as possible no matter how wild they are—the old adage of don’t self-­ censor until the edit stage. Schiavio and Benedek 2020 note: This availability of standardized measures of creative thinking enabled the investigation of the specific cognitive and brain processes underlying creative cognition, such as memory, control and attention. The role of cognitive control in creative cognition has been a vexing problem as there is evidence for the relevance of both controlled, goal-directed and spontaneous, undirected processes… While active creative thinking benefits from effective strategies and high cognitive capacity, spontaneous processes may be particularly relevant for more complex creative work that runs into impasses and involves incubation phases. (2020, 4)

In particular, they cite the findings from MRI around musical improvisation and poetry composition, which demonstrated the tandem work of “brain regions of the executive-control network (ECN) and the default mode network (DMN)” (Schiavio and Benedek 2020, 4). They note that the “ECN is typically involved in top-down control, whereas the DMN is mainly implicated in self-generated thought, which can be spontaneous as in mind-wandering, or goal-directed as in mental navigation” (Schiavio and Benedek 2020, 4). “The coupling of these large-scale brain networks during creative cognition is thought to reflect an interplay between controlled, evaluative and more undirected, generative processes” (Schiavio and Benedek 2020, 4). They also observe that the salience network (SN) which “is considered to be implicated in the dynamic transitions between DMN and ECN may contribute to creative thought by forwarding candidate ideas originating from the DMN to the ECN for high-order processing, such as idea evaluation” and that differences in the ability to

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simultaneously engage these regions may be a marker of creativity (Schiavio and Benedek 2020, 4–5). Additionally, Schiavio and Benedek 2020 outline the role of memory in creative cognition noting that “creative thinking is known to build on memory yet must go beyond recall in order to create something new” (Schiavio and Benedek 2020, 5). They cite research proposing that “Creative thought has been conceived of as a fruitful recombination of remote associative elements” and that “Neuroscience research revealed that both semantic memory and episodic memory play a chief role in creative cognition”, as well as that episodic remembering represents a reconstructive process and that there is increasing evidence that episodic memory networks (overlapping with the DMN) are also recruited during future thinking and creativity” (Schiavio and Benedek 2020, 5). They also note however that “the generation of creative new ideas slightly differs from the recall of known original ideas in additionally recruiting the left anterior parietal cortex, which again points to the involvement of executive processes for integrating memory content in new ways and supporting executively demanding mental simulations” (Schiavio and Benedek 2020, 5). In this pivotal article, Schiavio and Benedek also outline the research which shows that “when we imagine something new, indeed, we usually ignore or suppress irrelevant sensory input” and the “inhibition of task-­ irrelevant (sensory) processing which appears crucial for sustained internally directed activities involving imagination and mental simulation … (and that) less internal focus is necessary when retrieving more automatized procedures” (Schiavio and Benedek 2020, 5). Also of interest to us are their observations regarding the importance of domain specific knowledge (think how much you know in the domain of screenwriting) stating that “one must know the tools of the trade and rules of a given domain very well in order to extend, re-develop, or eventually break them in creative ways”. They also note how research has also revealed the importance of environmental factors including “stimulating others, supportive structures, or the general zeitgeist” (Schiavio and Benedek 2020, 5). These are of course what we usually term in screenwriting, “our tribe”! Schiavio and Benedek are thorough in their overview of key literature that situates creativity in the context of its wider sociocultural environment and group creativity, a field which looks at “how creators interact, how different social conditions affect creative outcomes, and how people judge the creative work of others” (Schiavio and Benedek 2020, 5). They

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note research that has shown “Creative behaviour is also affected by the attitude and feedback of others. While creativity is generally viewed as desired and needed, people often tend to reject novel, creative ideas due to their unfamiliarity and uncertainty” (Schiavio and Benedek 2020, 6), so of course this is where we have to make sure we stand up for our ideas no matter what—particularly if they might make you stand out from the crowd! To be honest, Schiavio and Benedek 2020’s article is pretty full on— and it is about creativity and music—but it is the most comprehensive and brief article that I have found that brings together cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience in a way wherein the fields complement each other to allow those of us in the creative field to understand what is happening in our brain. Also, Schiavio and Benedek work with Mastria and her colleagues from time to time, so they are all on the same page! Another important researcher from cognitive neuroscience whose work I find extremely relevant for us is the Canadian researcher Oshin Vartanian. In the chapter “Fostering Creativity: Insights from Neuroscience”, in his co-edited book, 2016, Neuroscience of Creativity, Vartanian argues “that evidence gleaned from the structure and function of the brain” from neuroscience “can enhance our ability to foster creativity” (Vartanian 2016, 257). Like cognitive psychology researchers, Vartanian posits from his overview of the research that the three fundamental components of creativity are motivation (task commitment), ability (domain expertise), and creative thinking skills and argues that interventions to enhance these abilities must be “realised in the brain and therefore have traceable neural correlates, which in turn can be used to verify that learning has occurred” (Vartanian 2016, 258). Of upmost interest is Vartanian’s more recent work with Lin where they investigate the reasons why we make choices from working memory and propose that these decisions are based on values (Lin and Vartanian 2018). These values may be informed by many factors including, for example, what we know and what we know we want to find out about. The point is of course that these are laboratory tests on subjects with specific nondomain simple tasks but the possibility of transferring this research and applying it to studies of experts in their field as a means of developing targeted pedagogies specifically targeted at neurologically determined areas of the brain in terms of the creative process, is what excites me.

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Retrofitting: Practice into Theory Here I think it is useful to challenge what we usually think about when we are learning—putting theory into practice—and think back to the practices we have just identified as those that are used by working screenwriters and see how a knowledge of what the brain is doing can help us do more of what works. Many of Bourgeois-Bougrine’s and her colleagues’ research subjects in the article “The Creativity Maze”, talked about just writing. Many said they needed to have a ritual to start like being in a café or listening to music or being in a certain room. You may have heard theories about right-brain/ left-brain modes of thinking. Like setting up a ritual to get out of organized left-brain analytical thinking and get into free-form creative right-brain thinking. Over the decades of creativity research, the idea of left-brain/right-brain thinking has gone in and out of favor. The jury is still out. I believe in switching the brain to different modes so the psychology research I am going to use illustrates this. It is recent and also acknowledges the ways that people have researched and thought about this.

Where To from Here? As we travel through this journey of ways to think and write better, a number of constants come up in the research. These include again the cognitive factors of divergent and convergent thinking including insight, conative factors including personality, the impact of emotion, and motivation and environmental factors. These are the factors we will focus on and enhance as we investigate how to think and write better. So armed with this working knowledge of what is happening in the brain as we think, in the following chapters I will integrate screenwriting research with proven results from cognitive psychology and neuroscience research to propose a way of developing your creativity at each stage of the creative process. In Chap. 9, I will also collate exemplar insights from the information discussed in this book in a table via the Creativity Metacognitive Framework (McVeigh 2020; McVeigh in McVeigh et al. 2023, 5) as a way of thinking about all the components of creativity that are working in tandem as we create during the Inspiration and Envisioning stage of the creative process. Now let’s pause for a moment and put some of the ideas we have explored in this chapter into practice by choosing one of the “What If?” activities that applies what we have learnt above.

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What If? 1. Brainstorming (Divergent Thinking) Brainstorming or divergent thinking is the classic and probably most well-known way of generating new ideas by writing down words that come immediately to mind—usually with some sort of word or question as a prompt. The key to successful brainstorming is that it is rapid and nonjudgmental. It is a good idea to make sure that when you brainstorm, you follow the three classic procedures to make the most of your time and process: first, quantity—just aim for as many ideas as you can; second, do not judge—either negatively, positively, or by facial expressions; and third, encourage original and wild ideas (Wilson 2013, 3–4). Some people like to brainstorm on a piece of paper, just writing words at any random angle on the page. Some like to write a list. Whatever works for you is what is best. Personally, I am a list person but that does not mean you have to be! One of the things that I have learnt about brainstorming is that it is important to go to the next step of convergent thinking so that you can get something concrete to work with out of your brainstorming. 2. Mind Mapping (Divergent and Convergent Thinking) Mind mapping is a much more visual method of divergent and convergent thinking similar to brainstorming, but it literally forms a map of words and sometimes images (aka squiggles that turn into random or recognizable images of something) heading in all directions over the page and linking together around a central focus. You can explore any subject with a mind map. Psychologist Tony Buzan has set himself up as the ultimate guru for mind mapping in the easy-to-read book, The Ultimate Book of Mind Maps (2007). He says, “Mind maps are brilliant route-maps for the memory, allowing you to organise facts and thoughts in such a way that your brain’s natural way of working is engaged right from the start” (Buzan 2005, 7). The parameters that are important, according to Buzan, are to create a structure that radiates from a starting central image in landscape paper mode. It is important to use color (use those highlighter pens), single words, curved lines (straight lines are boring), symbols, and images. You then can work on the second level of your mind map making deeper connections or associations between ideas and images by making

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thicker lines or branches that you can label with key words if they connect around a central precept, or to indicate a hierarchy of importance. The third level of the mind map is to branch off again around these key words (Buzan 2005, 7–20). Don’t be surprised if your mind map looks very organic and beautiful like a branching tree canopy full of words, color, and images that you can then use for inspiration! 3. Stream of Consciousness (Idea Generation) Stream-of-consciousness writing first was made famous with James Joyce’s novel Ulysses. With stream-of-consciousness  writing, there is no need to write in proper sentences or use proper punctuation. The idea is to just get those ideas down as they come into your head. As Paul Gardiner notes in his book Teaching Playwriting Creativity in Practice, it is useful to set parameters including time (2019, 100). Write in any mode you wish—prose, poetry, rap, scenes, letters. Choose what works for you as a prompt—words, images, music, or a slither of a sentence or a phrase. If you want, you can choose your favorite music to play in the background as you write. Or you can go to your favorite place or café, anywhere that makes you feel like writing. At the end of the time you set—10 minutes is a good start, but 20 minutes is better—look back at what you have written and highlight ideas that speak to you in some way—you are looking for something that will surprise or inspire you.

References Botella*, Marion, Franck Zenasni, and Todd Lubart. 2018. What Are the Stages of the Creative Process? What Visual Art Students Are Saying. Frontiers in Psychology 21 (Nov.). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02266 Bush, Vannevar. 1945. As We May Think. The Atlantic, July. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-­we-­may-­think/303881/. Buzan, Tony. 2005. The Ultimate Book of MindMaps. London UK: Thornsons. Harper Collins. Corazza, Giovanni Emanuele. 2020. Dynamic Creative Process. In Encyclopaedia of Creativity, 3rd ed., 400–405. London: Elsevier, Academic Press. Gardiner, Paul. 2019. Teaching Creativity in Practice: Playwrighting. Sydney, Australia: Bloomsbury Publishing. Joyce, James. 1920. Ulysses. Penguin Modern Classics.

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Karwowski, M., and I. Lebuda. 2016. The Big Five, the Huge Two, and Creative Self-Beliefs: A Meta-Analysis. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts 10 (2): 214–232. Lin, Hause, and Oshin Vartanian. 2018. A Neuroeconomic Framework for Creative Cognition. Perspectives on Psychological Science 13 (6): 655–677. Lubart, T., and F.  Zenasni. 2013. Creative Potential and Its Measurement. International Journal for Talent Development and Creativity 1 (2, Dec.): 41–50. Lubart, Todd, C. Mouchiroud, S. Tordjman, and F. Zenasni. 2015. Psychologie de la créativité (Psychology of Creativity). 2nd ed. Paris: Colin. Lynch, David. 2007. Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity. New York: Penguin. Macdonald, Ian W. 2013. Screenwriting Poetics and the Screen Idea. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mastria, Serena, Sergio Agnoli, Marco Zanon, Todd Lubart, and Giovanni Emanuele Corazza. 2018. Creative Brain Creative Mind Creative Person. In Exploring Transdisciplinarity in Art and Sciences, ed. Zoe Kapoula et  al. Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-­3-­319-­76054-­4_1. McVeigh, M. 2016. Finding the Lightbulb Moment: Creativity& Inspiration in the Teaching of the Craft of Screenwriting. ASPERA, 1–12. http://aspera. org.au/research/. McVeigh, Margaret. 2020. Creativity and Creative Practice: Towards a Meta-­ cognitive Domain Specific Framework for Writing and Making for the Screen. MIC Creativity Conference, Marconi Institute of Creativity, Bologna Italy 14–19 September 2020. Unpublished conference paper. McVeigh, Margaret, Andreia Valquaresma, and Maciej Karwowski. 2023. Fostering Creative Agency through Screenwriting: An Intervention. Creativity Research Journal. https://doi.org/10.1080/10400419.2023.2168341. Schiavio, A., and M. Benedek. 2020. Dimensions of Musical Creativity. Frontiers in Neuroscience 14 (Nov.): 1–23. Sternberg, R.J. 2005. Creativity or Creativities? International Journal of Human-­ Computer Studies 63 (4): 370–382. Sternberg, Robert J., and Todd Lubart. 1995. Defying the Crowd. New  York: Free Press. Vartanian, Oshin. 2016. Fostering Creativity: Insights from Neuroscience. In Neuroscience of Creativity, ed. Oshin Vartanian, A.S. Bristol, and C. Kaufman, 257–273. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Wilson, Chauncery. 2013. Brainstorming and Beyond. A User-Centred Design Method. Oxford: Morgan Kaufmann.

CHAPTER 4

Your Creative Personal Identity: And What to Do About It

Abstract  This chapter includes insights from cognitive psychology regarding one of the most powerful tools the screenwriter may develop in their journey to learn their craft—their creative personal identity and their unique voice based on their passions, experiences, and insights. It investigates research into the attributes of the creative personality including risk-­ taking, independent thinking, and openness to experience and aligns this with the personal attributes one may develop in the journey to become a better screenwriter. It explores the relevance of research from cognitive psychology regarding being “a creative”. These include the concepts of creative personal identity and the key components impacting this, including creative self-efficacy and creative self-belief. The theory and practice introduced in this chapter are enlivened by reflections from screenwriters, including those well established in industry and those emerging. Ultimately these reflections make the work relatable—the reader knows that they are not alone as they reflect on the observations of fellow screenwriters during the various stages of the creative process. The work of the chapter is encapsulated under the framework heading “Work in Progress” which crystallizes the relevant stage of thinking and writing like a creative. The “Creative

Work in Progress Creative Process Stage: Creative Personal Identity Craft Stage: Being a Writer © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. McVeigh, Screenwriting from the Inside Out, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40520-4_4

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Process Stage” explores key creativity theory and the “Craft Stage” backgrounds key screenwriting theory. The “What If?” section of the chapter is a concluding coda of three activities for thinking and writing like a creative, drawn from the ideas developed in the chapter. Keywords  Screenwriting • Creativity • Creative process • Creative personal identity Desire for an idea is like bait. When you’re fishing, you have to have patience. You bait your hook, then you wait. The desire is the bait that pulls those fish in—those ideas. The beautiful thing is that when you catch one fish that you love, even if it’s a little fish—a fragment of an idea—that fish will draw in other fish, and they’ll hook onto it. Then you’re on your way. Soon there will be more and more fragments, and the whole thing emerges. But it starts with desire. (Lynch 2007, 25)

Only You: Your Artistic Identity It is relatively easy to learn and practice the craft of screenwriting—know the rules, break the rules, read screenplays you love, watch films you love, and write, write, write. This takes time and practice. But to be a creative writer who writes new and original work takes more. What makes your stories creative is you and who you are—your creative artistic identity. Let’s think about it. As a screenwriter the stories you want to tell are unique. No one else in this world has lived the life you have lived. No one else has done what you have done. No one else has seen what you have seen. No one else thinks or feels like you. No one else is you or can tell a story like you can. A common screenwriting adage is “write what you know”. Indeed, acclaimed Japanese screenwriter, Kaneto Shindo, states: Who does a writer write about? He writes about himself. When I began writing at 25 years of age, I did not realise this. I wanted to write scripts that excited my own curiosity. But the more I wrote the more I came to realise that I was writing about myself. I do not know what my closest friend is thinking. I do not know anyone else’s mind, but I do know who I am. I know what kind of evil thoughts I have. I know what kind of good thoughts

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I have. Furthermore, I know that within my own heart those thoughts are constantly at battle. So, when I write I seek themes that represent myself, and the process of writing becomes an internal battle with myself. (Shindo 2003, 92–93)

Knowing who you are and the fact that you are unique is what makes you the only one able to tell your story in a new and original way—as we know, this is part of the very definition and essence of creativity. Let’s think about what makes you unique. Think about the things you like to read, watch, and do. Think about the experiences that have shaped your life. This will inform the type of stories you want to tell and the way you view the world. However, as screenwriters it is pertinent to remember that in the long run we have all experienced a version of the same thing which makes our experiences what we call in the business of storytelling, “universal”, the ability for our story to relate to anyone, anywhere in the world, in screenwriting theory “finding the global in the local”, in essence the great screenwriting adage, write “what you know to be true”. This is the way that our stories connect with people in our own backyard and all over the globe. There are really no rules when writing a good story. When I begin the intention is always to tackle the problems of society, then little by little it becomes a private story. I always write about my experience; even in the most fantastic tale there is some autobiographical truth. (D’Amico 2003, 163) As the Creativity Coach in my screenwriting classes, I encourage students to reflect on “what they know, what they know to be true, or what they know they want to find out about”. This knowledge and experience is the bedrock of your “Artistic Identity”, it is “the source of creativity that you carry within. Shaped by temperament and biographical circumstances, it is the inner force powering your search for answers to the unfinished business in your life” (Rabiger 2006, 23). In my screenwriting classes, following Rabiger, I ask students to survey their lives and explore their authorial goals, particularly how they would like to act on an audience. They do this by journalling and presenting (if they wish) around the following questions: 1. Peculiarities of my life that have made me see with special eyes are … 2. Conflicts formative in my life are … 3. Themes I would like to work on

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are … 4. Types of characters I empathize with are … 5. Story topics I’d like to explore are … 6. Ways I’d like to act on my audience are … (Rabiger 2006, 27)

To shape your writing like this—to draw on the themes and scenarios you know and love—is one of the key steps in writing a screenplay. But we all know as writers that there is more to writing than putting words on a page. As you write, you give or reveal a little of yourself—who you are, what you know, your hopes and dreams—this is part of what makes you unique also—but this is the scary part—to reveal to the world a little of yourself takes bravery and determination. It takes with it the promise of success, or the risk of failure. To think about who you are as a writer and how you can work on aspects of who you are, to get your work out into the world, is one of the most important things we can consider in our journey as screenwriters. Screenwriting books and great creative recovery books like Julia Cameron’s The Artists Way (1992) do an excellent job of helping us think about how to become a better writer by nurturing ourselves as writers, by building inspiration or working around writer’s block. However, the field of cognitive psychology offers us research that investigates the key attributes of the creative personality and how these may be enhanced and thus, I propose, applied to your screenwriting journey as you develop your unique artistic identity. Creativity research investigating personality and the process of creativity is vast. There are two areas of research in this field that are of interest to us in this chapter. One area is well established and explores the attributes of the creative personality. The other area is newer and explores what is called “Creative Personal Identity”, which figures around your beliefs about your own creativity and creativity in general. This topic is of interest to us as we seek to work on developing the attributes of your creative personal identity, as this is bedrock of your artistic identity which in turn impacts on how and why we create. Theories of the attributes of the creative personality and creativity have been conceptualized via powerful metaphors which beautifully encapsulate first, the idea of creativity and second, the attributes of the creative personality. So, let’s have a look at these first before we investigate the elements of your creative personal identity, aka Rabiger’s notion of your artistic identity, that we can develop in your journey to think and write like a creative.

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The Big 5: The Huge 2—What the Hell Are They Talking About? What is a creative person like? There are many myths about being a creative. It would sometimes seem that creatives have to look creative—dress and be different and nonconformist in some way. Perhaps wear black all the time. Or lock yourself in a room. Rest assured this is not the case. We can all be creative without having to look creative, and we can all think about how we can live a life that sets us up to be creative. In the following sections, I discuss the traits of the creative personality—most likely those that you were born with or have been shaped by your life circumstances to date. These are the personal attributes that empower our actual creativity and creative decision-making. Then there are the broader factors that make these more powerful—believing that we are creative, motivation, and so on. In reality all of these factors are combined but, in this book, so we can think about each and work on those that we believe will help us, I have distilled them into bite-size pieces. I think it is worthwhile to step back a bit and contextualize psychological studies of creativity so that we can understand where the research is coming from and take from it what works for us. The study of psychology is a broad academic field based in scientific research and it typically studies the mind and our behaviors, including what is conceived of as the conscious and the unconscious, including our thoughts and feelings. As we have previously noted, it covers both social sciences and behaviors in fields including developmental, educational psychology and organizational psychology, as well as the scientific workings of the mind in fields including neuroscience. In the early phases of the study of psychology as an academic discipline, there was a focus on studying human behaviors. While early psychology explored the ideas of Freud and the unconscious, other areas of psychology were more concerned with finding creative solutions for scientific and military reasons, for example, to become a world power or send the first person to the moon. However, in the 1960s there was a radical change after what is known as Guilford’s 1950 Presidential Keynote address to the eminent American Psychological Association (APA), which proposed that creativity should be a focus of psychology study. After this studies explored the attributes of highly creative people (people whom the researchers regarded as demonstrating Big C creativity) and came up with the following traits including “discernment, observance and alertness”, “openness

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to experience” and a “preference for complexity” (Sawyer 2012, 63–64). Since then, a wide range of studies have also observed and studied the key attributes of the creative personality which enable a person to step into unknown waters, including independence of spirit and judgment, a tolerance for ambiguity, the courage of one’s own convictions, the willingness to persevere no matter what including the ability to surmount obstacles, metaphorical thinking, flexible decision-making, high energy, independence of judgment, autonomy, self-control and the ability to hold on to routines, an attraction to complexity, broad interests, and a belief in being creative (Sawyer 2012, 65). One of the leading long-term researchers in the field, Robert Sternberg, notes the way creative people can turn things around by looking at things in novel ways: Creative people habitually (a) look for ways to see problems that other people don’t look for, (b) take risks that other people are afraid to take, (c) have the courage to defy the crowd and to stand up for their own beliefs, and (d) seek to overcome obstacles and challenges to their views that other people give in to, among other things. (Sternberg 2012, 4)

In “How Artists Create” (2013), Marion Botella and her colleagues use the Multivariate Model to condense and crystalize these traits. This is useful in considering and illustrating the important traits we can work on, if need be, as screenwriters. In discussing the conative traits of the creative person, they note these personality traits and motivations including being “open to new experiences” which is also “reflected in a dynamic fantasy life, esthetic sensibility, emotional awareness, need for originality, intellectual curiosity, and strong personal value system” as well as being “tolerant of ambiguity” and displaying “fantasy and imagination; and a lively, ambitious and nonconformist nature” (Botella et al. 2013, 162). Today, cognitive psychologists still tend to distill these traits into the popular paradigms like the Big Five (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) and the Huge Two (plasticity and stability) (Karwowski and Lebuda 2016, 1). It is pretty easy to remember these catchy titles which in effect summarize the key findings of major research in the field. Much of this research has been elegantly collated by Todd Lubart and Frank Zenasni in their 2013 article, “Creative Potential and its Measurement”, which I consider in more detail below, and align with what is super relevant to us as screenwriters.

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Conative behavior is how the way we behave is impelled by our attitudes, impulses, and drives. Most cognitive psychologists assert that the most important conative (impulses and drives) factors of the creative personality (to use the Multivariate Framework and to draw from the list above) are openness, risk-taking, and a tolerance for ambiguity. As a teacher of screenwriting, I have found that these are areas that we can purposely develop in our journey to make our writing more creative, as we can focus on doing something concrete that develops our competency in these areas, as we will see in the “What If?” section of this chapter. But first let’s get a handle on what we mean by these terms and what cognitive psychology research has proven about how these traits can be linked to increased creativity. Openness is “Reflected in features such as a general appreciation for art, emotion, adventure, unusual ideas, imagination, curiosity, and variety of experience, this trait has consistently been associated with creativity … A high level of openness is thought to facilitate the exploration of alternative solutions in the divergent thinking production” (Lubart and Zenasni 2013, 45–46). Tolerance of ambiguity is a trait which is defined as a “tendency to support and perhaps even be attracted to ambiguous situations” which “facilitates keeping a problem active and this prolonged treatment is favourable to the emergence of novel thinking” (Lubart and Zenasni 2013, 45). Risk taking “is central to creative work because originality involves breaking from habitual ideas … To engage in creative behaviour one must risk the use of personal resources (time, money, energy), and risk social criticism (new ideas are often met with resistance and rejection) … adults who expressed a willingness to take risks in a content domain of creative activity (such as an artistic or literary domain of work), as they envisioned their behaviour in hypothetical situations, tended also to produce more creative productions in the sector” (Lubart and Zenasni 2013, 45).

Understanding Your Creative Personal Identity Along with the actual personality traits that research has shown make up the creative person and are the most powerful attributes the writer  can deploy or develop in their journey to be more creative, are the concepts cognitive psychologists have researched to study how a person sees themselves as a creative entity, and the way this is shaped and informed as we go

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about a creative life. As noted above, this is a very new and exciting field, and a field that I have done recent research in with my cognitive psychology colleagues (McVeigh et al. 2023). In psychology, the concept, “Creative Personal Identity”, encompasses the notions of “Creative Self Belief”, “Creative Self Efficacy”, and “Creative Self Concept”. In their 2017 book, Creative Self: Effect of Beliefs, Self-Efficacy, Mindset, and Identity, Karwowski and Kaufman edited a collection of some of the most influential research in this area. The findings from this research will inform the work we will do in this book as the basis of how we want to see ourselves as writers—our creative artistic identity. Creative personal identity (CPI) is the broad term that encompasses the research currently being done around how you conceive or/and describe creativity as an important part of who you are—yourself and your identity (Karwowski and Barbot 2016). The traits that can be conceived of as part of one’s CPI are “high self-confidence, self-control, self-monitoring, self-­esteem, self-efficacy, and self-reinforcement, which is reinforced by mentors, belonging to a group of like-minded creators, gaining qualifications, choosing to work in a field” (Karwowski and Kaufman 2017, 137–148). Part of the functioning of this identity in a creative context is your creative self-efficacy (CSE), your creative self-belief, and your creative self-­ concept. CSE is one’s belief and confidence in one’s own ability to deal with creative tasks (Karwowski et al. 2019, 399), including balancing creative thinking and creative performance particularly in an area that you are skilled in and in which you have a specific task, such as writing a screenplay. It affects how you engage in the task and how you keep on going and recalibrate during the task despite blocks and obstacles. Basically, how good you think you are will affect how good your work will be! One thing that I found out when I started to try to bring together all the decades of research into cognitive psychology and neuroscience was that there was all this great research which did not necessarily talk to other research. In their book, Karwowski and Kaufman bring this together, so I am going to recap here things that are relevant to us. In their survey of the studies in the field, they found that openness to experience had a positive impact on developing our creative self-efficacy as did conscientiousness, confidence, and what are termed “extraversion”, “expectations”, and “optimism”—let’s call this positive thinking (Karwowski and Kaufman 2017, 23–44).

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What I am doing in this book is helping you to become aware of these aspects of yourself as an artist and to think about how you can work on them to be more creative. Here, the notion of creative metacognition (CMC) defined as being “a combination of self-knowledge … and contextual knowledge” (Karwowski et  al. 2019, 399) is also important. It encompasses traits associated with metacognition such as self-reflection, self-regulation, and self-monitoring. Basically, it boils down to being aware of who you are, what you are up to, what you know, how you can make adjustments to what you are doing to try something else and how you can take the next step—a knowledge of your craft! (Beghetto and Karwowski in Karwowski and Kaufman 2017, 12). Going just that bit further it will be empowering when we understand how all these concepts fit together and can reflect on them, deploying the even more highbrow-sounding term of “creative metacognition”, which we will look at in Chap. 9. Not that it is highbrow really. It just means thinking about how we think creatively, which is what we are doing as we work to  build an understanding of  the Creativity Metacognitive Framework (McVeigh 2020; McVeigh in McVeigh et al. 2023, 5) in this book.

Why Create? The Blinding Power of Intrinsic Motivation Most creativity research has explored the reasons why we want to create from the standpoint of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. Basically, the reason being somewhere along the continuum of “I want to do this just because I want to do this” to “I want to do this because I am going to get something out of it whether it be pay or praise”: intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. Most likely, both types of motivation will play a driving factor in your writing at different stages of your writing life. After all, writing is a lonely job, and it takes dedication and the ability to find pleasure and self-­ reward in what you are doing as there is no guarantee that what you write will meet the measure of success judged by external accolades. So, motivation starts with you and how you decide it is going to work for you when you write, whether it be for assessment, work, a means of coming to terms with what is happening in your life, or pleasure. However, the bottom line, as you are reading this book, is that you most likely see yourself as a creator or what I term in this book a “creative”. Therefore, you are most likely powered first of all by intrinsic

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motivation, the personal desire to produce creative work rather than for an external reward of some kind. “The motivation to engage in an activity solely for the enjoyment, challenge, or personal satisfaction that arises from the activity itself” (Conti and Amabile 1999, 251). This is certainly the case for my students. Once they have found something that they are passionate about, this will drive their intrinsic motivation: Depending on the project, I might feel quite different. Usually, I feel quite constrained, as if my conscious mind isn’t capable of producing a work I feel happy with. However, usually to overcome this, I usually research unrelated topics to try and kickstart connections between the central idea. Usually, I’m overcome with a sense of self-doubt and struggle to consciously develop an idea to proper project. I often question my motivations to even write.... However, I have noticed that if I am able to pinpoint something I’m passionate and interested in, I might be able to dispel some of these other feelings. (Student 3 2020)

This finding regarding intrinsic motivation as being the most important type of motivation for engaging in creative work is echoed in more recent research regarding intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. “Intrinsic motivation if regularly viewed as a good predictor of an individual’s likelihood to engage in a creative work and is associated with related traits such as perseverance and commitment to the task” (Lubart and Zenasni 2013, 46)  while  extrinsic motivators “such as prizes or monetary rewards, or prizes, may encourage an individual to commit effort to overcome obstacles to complete their work” (Lubart and Zenasni 2013, 46) Sarah Luria and James C. Kaufman’s study “The Dynamic Force Before Intrinsic Motivation: Exploring Creative Needs” (2017) is one of the few studies that has empirically explored what drives us in a systematic manner. They really go into detail about how psychology research has investigated both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, wherein they have studied factors integral to intrinsic motivation including enjoying a challenge, feeling curious, or wanting to increase one’s knowledge or skills and driven by extrinsic motivation including rewards, evaluation for, for example, educational purposes and competition. Luria and Kaufman propose a model driven by what they call the core sources of creative need grounded in an individual’s interests, values, and passion. I think this is more in line with what the emerging screenwriter feels when they are impelled to write. I really like their framework as it looks at creativity from the standpoint of

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the artist themselves. It includes beauty, power, discovery, communication, individuality, and pleasure (Luria and Kaufman 2017, 320–323). So, let’s look at this in more detail. I think it is really useful to ask yourself why you want to write a particular story because it can vary depending on what you wish to explore. Whether it be moving to a new town, finding out about a dark family story, experiencing your first relationship breakup, being challenged at work, or being incensed by what is happening in the world. All of these events can trigger a story scenario but the reason you want to write a story about the event and the tone and themes you want to explore can be different depending on what your creative need is as Luria and Kaufman suggest. For example, whether you want to write about an experience in an innovative, aesthetic mode that channels the avant-garde and appeals to the senses, or whether you want to write a confronting, gritty realist story that makes people uncomfortable and challenges them to think or act. It is driven by your artistic identity and your intrinsic motivation, including your creative need. In my scripts there is always a subject I want to discuss with the viewer. I start by asking myself whether this subject is significant, and whether I have anything to say about it. The actual subjects or themes arise from my own introspection. Once I have my subject or theme, I start and write the first scene while being aware of what I shall say in the last scene. (Piesiewicz 2003, 131)

Let’s pause for a moment here and consider these creative needs or desires  that drive you at various times or maybe all the time. Luria and Kaufman’s (2017) analysis revealed that the desire to create something for yourself or others that is striking either intellectually, morally, or aesthetically can be one reason encapsulated by the notion of beauty. Maybe art for art’s sake but for appreciation or expression. The psychologists’ low down—to satisfy a basic human need to stimulate the pleasure areas of the brain! The driving force of power—I would not really call this power but this is what the research says—is translated by Luria and Kaufman as the desire to be first, to be recognized or have your work acknowledged or appreciated by others. You decide this works for you or not, but this is what the research says. Maybe you might like to think of this more along the lines of the need for individuality and uniqueness which is also tied up with our search for self-understanding and our ongoing creation of our identity.

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Another desire identified is what Luria and Kaufman (2017, 321) propose as discovery, improvement, or progress as a result of curiosity or to learn new knowledge or understand, to seek truth. Personally, I can relate to this, and it holds with the adage of write “what you know you want to find out about” but again you need to decide if this is a driver for you. The need for communication is conceived as a shared desire to understand others and to be understood—a shared knowledge. It more or less ties into one of the basic ideas of why we tell stories from time immemorial—to share experience to let others know how to survive in similar situations (Luria and Kaufman 2017, 321–322). Finally, they identify just straight-out pleasure as a creative need. The research identifies this as potentially an escapist but important way of experiencing happiness and engagement and developing our cognitive abilities as part of the process not only as an outcome. Basically, it is up to you to decide if any of this research is important as you engage in a creative work. In a way I find this liberating. I am not alone when I decide I want to write something just for myself or get lost in writing without the pressures of having to create something for a worthy reason (Luria and Kaufman (2017, 322).

The Power of Emotion and Motivation One of the misconceptions about writing is the importance of emotion in inspiring or impelling the writer. A popular belief is that a truly creative artist has to be in a state of high emotion—usually sad and dejected to write  about heartbreak—to write something that touches other people. One of the attributes of the creative personality as theorized in the Big Five framework from psychology, investigates the idea that neuroticism plays an important part of being “a creative”. Equally great writers like the Romantic Poets tried to live or prove this idea in their experiments with opium. I don’t agree with this idea even though there is a lot of research out there that investigates the notion. First, there is equally a lot of research that proves that emotion does not have to be on the sad spectrum—it can be both sad and happy. Botella and her research colleagues consider our emotional traits and states in their article, “How artists create: Creative Process and Multivariate Factors”. They define emotional traits and states more broadly than the idea that to be an artist one needs to be neurotic. For them, emotion is demonstrated by “emotional clarity and capacity to

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perceive feelings, and artists compared to scientists tended to be more emotional, anxious, emotionally unstable and to have a strong sensibility” (Botella et al. 2013, 162). Basically, we need however to feel something to be able to convey something to others as we write, as one of the main goals of writing a screenplay is to take the audience on an emotional journey—in Western storytelling traditions, a journey that has been formulated via concepts like the rising three-act structure, the hero’s or heroine’s journey, or the notion of parametric narration. More on this in the next section when we consider how we use structure in screenwriting to orchestrate the audience’s emotions. In this chapter, we just want to think about how we tap into the emotions we want to explore and how we use our emotions to envisage our work and inspire us. This is how one of my screenwriting students works with and recognizes their emotional states as an important part of who they are as a screenwriter. I am often very anxious. There is a sense that unless I can see clearly what is happening in my mind or what has happened in my past, if I cannot crystallize it into words while the mirage is fresh, it may evaporate, and I will lose the clarity of the moment. So that even if the memory returns later, it may not include the intricate detail of that first emergence, jolted from the subconscious. Once I have translated the memory or idea into written form, I breathe with relief. (Student 2 2019)

Hand in hand with the ability to use our emotions to guide us in finding and knowing what we want to write about are the craft tools of distilling this emotion via tone and metaphor. Interestingly, there is a significant body of psychology research about how we create metaphor—what psychologists posit is the highest level of analytical thinking.

Tapping into Emotion The idea of tapping into, writing with, or orchestrating emotion is central to the Western storytelling paradigm. Some like to feel good by watching a rom-com. Some like to get their thrills by watching the latest horror movie. Some like to feel as if they are there with the detectives whether it be in a B Grade genre movie or complex police procedural. All the thrills and spills of moviegoing start with emotion. So what is emotion and how can we channel more or less at the service of our story? Aristotle’s

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definition of drama is conflict, and, according to Aristotle, conflict is character in action. So, we may think it would seem easy to write a story; to create drama, all we need to do is come up with some characters and some conflict and we can generate and orchestrate emotion! Wrong. Easy will not do if we have to dig deep to create good drama, and this is where the power of emotion comes in. It can be the emotions that you tap into and write in an expressive way, it can be the emotions of the character that you create, it can be the overall tone of your story—sad if tragedy, happy if comedy, terrifying if horror, suspenseful if thriller—that you envisage that forms the emotional  bedrock of the genre you are using to explore your story. But at the bottom of all this drama, suspense, conflict is emotion—your emotions as you channel a bit of yourself as you write, the emotions of your characters as they meet the obstacles and challenges you set up via the plot of your story and the emotions of your audience as you orchestrate their journey in the world of your story. Beyond the field of screenwriting, there is a whole world of theory around emotions, again from the field of cognitive psychology.  In their chapter, “Emotions and Creativity”, researchers Zorana Ivcevic Pringle and Jessica Hoffman (2019) really dig into the impact of emotions on the ways that a creative channels this powerful storytelling tool. They survey a number of decades of recent psychology research regarding the impact of emotions including emotion-related personality factors and the impact of emotional states on the creative personality during the creative process. Let’s look at what they say. Contrary to the popular stereotype of the creative personality being a tortured artist, Ivcevic Pringle and Hoffman, found in their review of the literature around the role of emotions in the creative process, that both positive and negative emotional states, as well as the emotions they classify as both sympathy and nostalgia had an impact on creativity. Interestingly, being at one end of the emotional spectrum or the other did not enhance the creative output (Ivcevic  Pringle and Hoffman 2019, 273–276). Bottom line. No need to be sad to create drama. However, they did remind us that the big factors linked to the prediction of how creative an output will be are openness to experience and tolerance for ambiguity. Linked to these personality attributes are what we could call emotional factors that they also link with the creative process, including the ability to bear the discomfort and uncertainty of complex tasks (Ivcevic Pringle and Hoffman 2019, 273–277).

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So, for us that means we know the process of creating is complex, but we can have the fortitude to follow the journey. The most interesting factor these researchers isolated as being important to consider on our emotional journey as a screenwriter is passion. In psychology, passion is defined as “a construct that unites a strong affective desire and commitment and dedication to an activity”. It is tied to motivation, what the psychologists call “high arousal affect” and enjoyment, but is more—it is central to who we are—it is part of our identity (Ivcevic  Pringle and Hoffman 2019, 278). The takeaway for us here? We have to feel passionate about our art and craft and the story we wish to tell to make it truly creative. I think you all know where I am coming from. But this translates into making sure what you are writing about is something that you feel passionate about. And if you don’t feel passionate about it, it is better to keep searching at the inspiration stage until you find something that literally turns you on. Ivcevic  Pringle and Hoffman also overview established research about other factors affecting emotional states, including whether the task presented was fun or serious, and whether the individual during the process was a person who was anxious or chilled and how this impacted when they were met with obstacles. For people in various situations, they found that, for example, if one was in a positive activating mood, your thinking could be more flexible and fluent, but, likewise, if one was in a negative activating mood, it enhances perseverance. They looked at studies that showed the impact of people playing a particular kind of music during a specific part of the creative process. For example, one study looked at how people specifically set themselves up to generate a particular emotion when they create, for example, those who chose positive upbeat music to put them in the mood for generating ideas or sad music when they wanted to write more analytically (Ivcevic Pringle and Hoffman 2019, 283). Can you relate to that? However, in the long run what we can understand from the research is that  the ways in which factors impact our emotions during the creative process are different and there are no clear predictors, as these factors are unique for everyone. Whether it is that we are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of ideas that we could write about or frustrated because we just can’t work out exactly what a character would say in a particular scene, it is okay. This very new research area of creative self-regulation during creativity shows us that “understanding abilities to use and manage emotions during the creative process is at least as important for creativity scholarship as understanding how emotions can be beneficial or detrimental to creative thinking” (Ivcevic Pringle and Hoffman 2019, 281, 284–285).

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Ivcevic Pringle and Hoffman’s research is also supported by researchers Serena Mastria and her colleagues (2018, 16) who discuss the role of emotion and motivation in creative cognition. (Here it is relevant to note that creative cognition forms part of the cognitive component of creativity when we use the Multivariate Model to scaffold insights across multiple fields of research, as I am doing in this book). Mastria and her colleagues in their chapter “Creative Brain, Creative Mind, Creative Person” (2018) state that “the important role of emotion and motivation in modulating creative behaviour has been stressed. Brain motivational systems are particularly relevant as creative individuals show greater baseline levels of arousal and stronger response to sensory stimulation” (Mastria et al. 2018, 17). They also found that “high levels of motivation are associated with a proportionally high number of novel and useful ideas” but as well “another line of research highlights that negative mood can have a facilitative influence on creativity”! (Mastria et al. 2018, 17). So overall they too found that both positive and negative emotions may enhance creative performance, the deciding factor though was if accompanied by motivation (Mastria et al. 2018, 17). So, what do we know? Don’t worry about getting into a happy or sad state to write. Just want to write, and feel the passion and its flow on effect, which will have a beneficial impact on your creative process and output. This is what one of my students wrote: Digging deeply into the core of the story and the reason I chose this particular story ... gives me the passion I need to keep working hard to write the best version possible of the screenplay. This passion, resilience is really important in the writing process. And I can see very clearly after so many outlines and treatment drafts how much the story improved. This constant self-inquiry has been the most important aspect of the writing process. (Student 1 2019)

Building on the theory above, which I distil in my creativity workshops around the personal and professional aspects of screenwriting and the creative process, I encourage my students to think about what made them unique as writers, to value themselves and their experiences, viewing passions and observations as part of their storytelling potential. A discussion of Julia Cameron’s work in The Artist’s Way—for example,—provides a valuable resource in suggesting to students how their lives and observations are pivotal for their inspiration (1992, 9–18). Now let’s have a look

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at the “What If?” section to further investigate what makes you unique as a screenwriter so you can channel your motivations and passions as you write.

What If? 1. Dreaming Big I have created this exercise which taps into your motivations as well as makes you think about the attributes of your creative personality to start you on the journey to writing your screenplay. It also taps into your long-­ term memory and the things and experiences that have made you unique. If the questions do not work for you you may like to replace them with Rabiger’s  questions regarding your creative artistic identity which were detailed at the beginning of this chapter. Wht are my story goals? Why am I the only person who can tell my story? What type of story form will I use? (documentary, allegory, period drama, genre) What type of film style will I use? (e.g., handheld, realist, allegory) How will I get my message across? How will my audience feel after they have seen my story on the screen? What will be unique or new or different about my story? Where will my story take me? Personally? Professionally? 2. My Life to Date What drives you? What is important to find out, to you? You may think that you have led a fairly ordinary life, or you may know you have led an extraordinary life. Most likely, if you are reading this book, you have not explored what makes you unique or the themes and desires that underline your life to date. This is a truly surprising and delightful exercise that I have adapted from the book Creative Filmmaking From the Inside Out (Dannenbaum  et  al. 2010). Doe Mayer (one of the authors) used this exercise in a workshop run by her that I once attended. It is a variation on stream of consciousness writing. I use it now with every screenwriting class I have. It is so powerful!

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Step One. Take 15 minutes to write stream of consciousness detailing your life to date. Step Two. Again take 15 minutes to write stream of consciousness about your life to date. The proviso. You cannot repeat anything you wrote in the first account. Step Three. Compare your two entries. What do you find? There is no correct answer but in most instances my students have found that the first entry is quite fact driven and usually unfolds chronologically. And here is where we find the gold. The second entry—because usually we have written all the surface info—most likely delves into experiences and emotions. For example, in the first entry someone might write that the first school they went to was, for example, in a new town. In the second entry, they might say what it felt like to be a stranger in a new school and how difficult it was to make friends when everyone else seemed to know each other. Can you relate to that? Do you want to find out more. I know I do! Writing is about being brave enough to explore what is called a universal story—something that no matter what time or place we can all relate to because emotionally we have been in that place or experienced those feelings. The second writing entry of “My Life to Date” opens us to exploring that experience and can provide a powerful motivation to want to write. 3. Taking a Risk: Seeing Differently Often, we need to think outside the square and let all those learned behaviors stored in the long-term memory get shaken up. Betty Edwards was an art teacher who came to prominence with her book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (1979), where she drew on the then, and sometimes still now, believed paradigm of the left-brain and right-brain thinking where the left brain is the logical ordered brain, that we would use to edit and plan, and the right side is the creative free-flowing brain which we access to let our imaginations run free. In this book, there is a great exercise I like to use with my students called Upside Down Drawing (Edwards 1979, 46–48). Basically, the idea is to free yourself of habit and conceptions about what you “should” be drawing and let your brain take over as you try to copy the drawing. The drawing is taken from a famous vase/ face drawing. Have a go and follow the instructions super carefully for it to work. The idea is to draw “a profile of the person’s head on the left side of the paper, facing toward the centre. (If you are left-handed draw the profile on the right side facing toward the centre)” (Edwards 1979, 46–47).

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The following are the steps in the vase/face drawing exercise (https:// www.drawright.com/try-­an-­exercise): . Use a pencil to draw with. Keep an eraser near you. 1 2. Use a piece of plain white paper. 3. You may copy the drawing the same size or larger or smaller—whatever takes your fancy. Your copy will be upside down as the drawing you are copying is upside down. 4. You can start anywhere you wish—there are no rules, but it is recommended you move from line to adjacent line. 5. If you are talking to yourself or thinking, make sure you are not being negative, saying this is too hard; just think about how the lines angle and copy. 6. You can use artists’ tricks like dropping imaginary lines to locate various parts but no need as the parts will fit together if you just go with the flow. 7. If possible, try to keep a note of what goes on in your brain like states of mind during the upside-down drawing. In particular try to note your reaction when you finish. 8. Find a quiet space to do your drawing. It is suggested you may need up to 20 minutes. What did you learn about yourself as an artist? Were you surprised? Did you feel anything happening inside yourself? In your mind? Your thoughts? Your feelings? How could you transfer this finding to your work as a screenwriter? (Edwards 1979, 46–48).

References Beghetto, Ron A., and Maciej Karwowski. 2017. Toward Untangling Creative Self-Beliefs. In The Creative Self, ed. Maciej Karwowski and James C. Kaufman, 3–22. Cambridge: Academic Press. Botella, Marion, Vlad Glaveanu, M.  Frank Zenasni, N.  Storme, M.  Wolff Myszkowski, and Todd Lubart. 2013. How Artists Create: Creative Process and Multivariate Factors. Learning and Individual Differences 26: 161–170. Cameron, Julia. 1992. The Artist’s Way. London: Pan Books. Conti, R., and T. Amabile. 1999. Motivation/Drive. In Encyclopedia of Creativity, ed. M. Runco and S.R. Pritzke. San Diego: Academic Press.

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D’Amico. 2003. Screencraft: Screenwriting. Edited by Declan McGrath, and Felim MacDermott, pp. 152–164. Switzerland: Rotovision. Dannenbaum, Jed, Carroll Hodge, and Doe Mayer. 2010. Creative Filmmaking from the Inside Out: Five Keys to the Art of Making Inspired Movies and Television. New York: Touchstone. Edwards, Dr Betty. 1979. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher Inc. Karwowski, Maciej, and B.  Barbot. 2016. Creative Self-Beliefs: Their Nature, Development, and Correlates. In Creativity and Reason in Cognitive Development (Current Perspectives in Social and Behavioral Sciences), ed. J.C. Kaufman and J. Baer, 302–336. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Karwowski, Maciej, and James C.  Kaufman, eds. 2017. Creative Self: Effect of Beliefs, Self-Efficacy, Mindset, and Identity. London: Academic Press. Karwowski, Maciej, and I.  Lebuda. 2016. The Big Five, the Huge Two, and Creative Self-Beliefs: A Meta-Analysis. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts 10 (2): 214–232. Karwowski, Maciej, Izabela Lebuda, and Ronald A. Beghetto. 2019. Creative Self Beliefs. In The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity (Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology), ed. J. Kaufman and R. Sternberg, 396–418. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316979839.021. Lubart, Todd, and Franck Zenasni. 2013. Creative Potential and Its Measurement. International Journal for Talent Development and Creativity 1 (2, Dec.): 41–50. Luria, Sarah R., and James C. Kaufman. 2017. The Dynamic Force Before Intrinsic Motivation: Exploring Creative Needs. In The Creative Self, ed. M. Karwowski and J.C. Kaufman, 317–325. Cambridge: Academic Press. Lynch, David. 2007. Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity. New York: Penguin. Mastria, Serena, Sergio Agnoli, Marco Zanon, Todd Lubart, and Giovanni Emanuele Corazza. 2018. Creative Brain Creative Mind Creative Person. In Exploring Transdisciplinarity in Art and Sciences, ed. Zoe Kapoula et  al. Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-­3-­319-­76054-­4_1. McVeigh, Margaret. 2020. “Creativity and Creative Practice: Towards A Meta-­ Cognitive Domain Specific Framework for Writing and Making for the Screen”. MIC Creativity Conference, Marconi Institute of Creativity, Bologna Italy 14–19 Sept 2020. Unpublished conference paper. McVeigh, Margaret, Valquaresma, Andreia, and Karwowski, Maciej. 2023. Fostering Creative Agency through Screenwriting: An Intervention. Creativity Research Journal. https://doi.org/10.1080/10400419.2023.2168341 Piesiewicz, Krzysztof. 2003. Screencraft: Screenwriting. Edited by Declan McGrath and Felim MacDermott, pp. 126–138. Switzerland: Rotovision.

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Ivcevic Pringle,  Zorana, and Jessica Hoffman. 2019. Emotions and Creativity: From Process to Person to Product. In The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity, ed. James C.  Kaufman and Robert J.  Sternberg, 273–295. Cambridge University Press. Rabiger, Michael. 2006. Developing Story Ideas: Find the ideas you haven’t had yet. Amsterdam: Focal Press. Sawyer, Keith. 2012. Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation. Oxford University Press. Shindo, Kaneto. 2003. Screencraft: Screenwriting. Edited by Declan McGrath and Felim MacDermott, pp. 92–93. Switzerland: Rotovision. Sternberg, Robert. 2012. The Assessment of Creativity: An Investment-Based Approach. Creativity Research Journal 24 (1): 3–12.

CHAPTER 5

Finding the Lightbulb Moment: Inspiration and Envisioning

Abstract  This chapter focuses on the Inspiration and Envisioning stage of the screenwriting creative process and the key personal and practical factors needed to be inspired to write a screenplay. These form the bedrock of the creative process—motivation and the need to write, to tell a story, to share an experience, to ponder possibilities, and to cast a net into the unknown. The chapter investigates the ways we can open our minds to inspiration. It links to research about the key facets of the creative personality found in cognitive psychology and neuroscience to be strong indicators of creativity. These include openness to experience and the importance of factors like risk taking and a tolerance for ambiguity as well as the place that emotion plays in the creative process. It considers what it means to be open to experience and how it assists the writer to access inspiration for their work. It also considers how the writer can use knowledge about the creative personality to push themselves to search for something new and different that will lead them on the road to making unique and original work. The work of the chapter is encapsulated under the framework heading “Work in Progress” which crystallizes the relevant stage of thinking and writing like a creative. The “Creative Process Stage” explores key creativity theory and the “Craft Stage” backgrounds key screenwriting Work in Progress Creative Process Stage: Inspiration and Envisioning Craft stage: Working Title, One Liner © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. McVeigh, Screenwriting from the Inside Out, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40520-4_5

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theory. The “What If?” section of the chapter is a concluding coda of three activities for thinking and writing like a creative, drawn from the ideas developed in the chapter. Keywords  Screenwriting • Creativity • Creative process • Inspiration • Motivation Inspiration comes from everywhere and nowhere, from life and from dreams and from places that have no names. It comes most often in small pieces as tiny and bright as diamonds. I catch them when I can and hold them tight. I wish on them like stars and from them come the seeds of stories. (Tami Hoag. 1995. Dark Paradise, Orion, Author’s note)

Finding Inspiration Finding inspiration is easy if we are open to the world around us and what is happening to us and that world. It is important to remember that the greatest predictor of creativity is to be open to experience and to collect the little gems of inspiration that will form the basis of your ideas, characters, and story. There are so many great one-liners that sum up the notion that we are searching for inspiration and the big idea that will be the one that impels us to write. Finding the “lightbulb moment”. The “ah ha” or “eureka” moment. This moment has been theorized or illustrated both in screenwriting and in psychology. For the filmaker and creativity advocate David Lynch, the spark is the lightbulb moment. He tells us that the one line, “Dick Laurent is dead”, sparked the idea for his  wonderful and enigmatic feature film Lost Highway. In the opening scenes of the film, over the intercom we hear the line “Dick Laurent is dead”, and we are launched into the  multicolored dreamlike fantasy that is Lost Highway (1997). Everyone has a favorite or a tried-and-true way that they use to access inspiration that leads to that eureka moment. The danger is not to default to that way but to go beyond so that more new and unusual ideas can be at your fingertips. Most of the popular advice around accessing  inspirations is well known to us—tap into your unconscious processes including dreams and meditation, use your instinct or intuition to find insight, be

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open to serendipity and the chance event, listen to music, go to the art gallery, journal, walk and walk some more, and collage together unusual juxtapositions by, for example, using tarot cards and random images. What I find interesting is that some or all these methods do work, for some people, sometimes. What I find more interesting is to understand why they work so that we can use these tools on demand rather than get stressed because no idea is coming. As writers, we are not alone in seeking to understand how to get inspiration. This is what one of my students says about inspiration: How do you get inspiration is a very interesting question … So, when I think about my latest films and screenplays, the majority comes from a place of heart and soul. Most of my stories and scenes come to me when I am in bed getting ready to sleep. It is in that moment that a shut myself from the everyday world and in the darkness, literally and metaphorically, examine my inside. Sometimes I see a scene, others just a feeling, but there’s always something there for me to start writing. (Student 1 2019)

The Creativity Maze While talking about the process of inspiration is well documented in interviews with writers, little scientific research has been done. However, the groundbreaking 2014 study, “The Creativity Maze: Exploring creativity in screenplay writing”, by Samira Bourgeois-Bougrine, Vlad Glaveanu, Marion Botella, and their colleagues including Todd Lubart, has collated research into how screenwriters work through the creative process of screenwriting, including inspiration. During the inspiration stage, what they termed “Phase A: Impregnation” (not a word I would choose but you get the gist; let’s call this incubation), the first stage of the screenwriting process, they found that there were a number of common things that screenwriters did as they sought inspiration for new work. These included sitting in cafes, listening to music, and reading the newspaper. All things that you probably do. Let’s see what these screenwriters said about finding inspiration as described in this research. Have a think about whether you do any of these things or whether you might like to have a go at doing some of the things these writers do as part of your own processes at the inspiration stage.

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They found that for the most part, sources of inspiration were both internal and external and included “intuition, instinct, or unconscious processes; chance, hazard, and unexpected events; introspection and identification with the characters; the cast; opinions and discussions; and documentation and interviews” (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 393). During this phase, scriptwriters focused on understanding the demands of the task through discussions with the director or peers, collecting an important amount of documentation, and, finally, thinking and “dreaming” about the topic of the film. They noted that sometimes there was a difficulty in getting started and that sometimes this initial phase could last a number of weeks or even months before writing the actual script begins. One described what would seem to some to be doing nothing: I like to hang around, read, do nothing … If I am the one in charge of writing the outline, I say: “yeah, yeah, it’s coming along” even though I have not written a f… g line. But I have taken some notes, I have read … I have worked internally. (S1) (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 390)

One described the roundabout way of getting to the job of writing by what is known in psychology, as immersing yourself in other realms: I find it hard to tackle the job head on. I first circle, I turn around it … Generally, I do a lot of things that are indirectly related to the work, I read a lot, I copy many texts that interest me, I see a lot of movies, I listen to a lot of music … I do many things around the work which I think will be the foundation of the work itself. (D4) (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 390)

One of the most important things that Bourgeois-Bougrine and her colleagues found was that almost half of those who participated in the research highlighted the importance of allowing the unconscious mind to “do its thing” by daydreaming, thinking or mind wandering during the initial phase of working on a script: Dreaming for as long as possible about things, in a chaotic and erratic way, I try to make this time of openness last as long as possible. I find that this space of connections made at the beginning, mainly because you are still not “under the gun,” is generally decisive. (S3) (Bourgeois-Bougrine et  al. 2014, 390)

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Another said: I need time to imagine, to leave some room for daydreaming… In any case, I think that it is like a washing machine cycle, you know, the ones that are very slow.  We believe the machine is done but no, in fact it continues to work. In fact, you can do other things, even watch a silly TV show, there are neurons that connect and stay on the topic. It is foundational work being done: it moves, it is always there. (N13) (Bourgeois-Bougrine et  al. 2014, 391)

Interestingly, all those involved in the research believed that this phase of incubation or inspiration allowed for new connections to be made in the brain. Whether or not they knew that this idea could be scientifically validated is probably not relevant as these screenwriters reported what they were doing. However, it is super important to us as the reality of them doing what they found works can be proved in science which makes this often-uncomfortable phase where it can seem like we as writers are procrastinating, an actual important and vital part of the creative process where we will find ideas are incubating with possibilities. Another of the key psychology research projects specifically about screenwriting, also conducted by Samira Bourgeois-Bougrine and her colleague Vlad Glaveanu, is the chapter “Collaborative Screenwriting: Social Factors and Psychological Factors” in Todd Lubart’s 2018 edited book, The Creative Process: Perspectives from Multiple Domains. I am also going to discuss this study in detail because, as I have mentioned, while there are a host of studies based around interviews with individual writers who talk about their process in an anecdotal way, there is little datadriven scientific research. However, it must be noted that research based on interviews, which is called qualitative research, is very insightful and important; for example, you can look at the interviews and see what qualities are mentioned in response to questions and see if your work shares any of these qualities. However, there are very few studies which are quantitative, which in effect give substance to anecdote with scientific data. That is data which is generated sometimes not only by interviews but also by other methods including surveys and questionnaires and analyzed using scientific methods. The study by Bourgeois-Bougrine and Glavenau included both qualitative and quantitative data and was in two parts.

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I have to be honest with you. This seems like a lot of information to take on board. It has taken me a long time to distil all the findings from my work with students, my knowledge and practice of screenwriting craft, and the proven findings I have been able to find from cognitive psychology and neuroscience, to uncover how we can be aware of our creative process. In research, this is called “metacognition”—being able to think about what we are thinking. My contention in this book is that if we have metacognition about our creative processes as a writer, we can be both more original and effective in our work. Let’s face it. Writing may be your job and/or your hobby so time and energy need to be corralled off from the business of life. So, it is good to know how to be more focused, time effective, and more original in the limited time we have to write to internal or external deadlines. Now getting back to Bourgeois-Bougrine and Glavenau’s exciting 2018 study. The first part of the study analyzed interviews with 22 award-­ winning French professional scriptwriters to investigate “the general way in which they create a new script” (2018, 124). While the focus of this research was to investigate the social and psychological factors involved in a highly collaborative screenwriting scenario, where a writer received constant feedback for development from a director and other key creatives (which we will talk in Chap. 8, “Shaping and Sharing”), what is of interest to us here in this chapter about inspiration is that the writers interviewed each revealed different ways of working, depending on the demands of inspiration and collaborative problem-solving: for example, whether they wrote alone or in collaboration with another writer, whether as a writer they liked to start with character creation as the first element of script development, or whether the director had a clear emotion they wished to engender in the audience (2018, 127–130). (Remember psychologists like to talk about creativity as the solving of a problem, while, as writers, we know it is a beautiful challenge!) The second part of Bourgeois-Bougrine and Glavenau’s study investigated how a group of six scriptwriting and filmmaking students learnt the process of writing a script with a given theme over a period of eight weeks (2018, 124). It validated their proposed three-phase model of working on a script being “impregnation, planning for action or structuring, and production; or the cycle of writing and rewriting the actual script” (2018, 132). It also investigated the psychological processes these six student screenwriters made reference to during each stage of screenwriting. Over

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a period of eight weeks, they were tasked to write a screenplay around a given scenario. They were asked to complete a weekly self-report about the stages of the creative process and associated social factors in a scenario that involved much collaboration during the first three weeks of development. Thirteen stages of the creative process were included: “definition of the problem; documentation; consideration of the restraints; insight; association or associative thinking; experimentation; exploration, insight; assessment; structuration; the chance benefit; realisation or implementation; finalisation; and taking a break” (Bourgeois-Bougrine and Glăveanu 2018, 141). In the following sections of this chapter, I am going to unpack some of these findings relevant to the Inspiration and Envisioning Stage. These include the findings about physically setting yourself up for finding inspiration—finding solitude or a room of your own, and creating a routine as well as the mental processes that writers found helpful during the inspiration stage. Like doing the washing!

A Room of One’s Own One of the most consistent ideas that enables the processes of inspiration is that an artist needs a room of their own. Solitude. Starving in a garret. Communing with nature; whatever it may be, it all boils down to solitude—creating a time and space to think to find inspiration. One of the most challenging, yet at the same time exciting aspects of being a writer is that you get to be on your own. By yourself. A lot! So you often don’t really get a chance to ask other people about their process. Sometimes you may be lucky to read what another writer shares in an interview or in a podcast or conversation, but this is usually very anecdotal and, while personal, not subject to the testing or research which can be replicated as I have mentioned above. I believe the first factor in setting yourself up for finding inspiration is to think about where and when you like to think and write. In a real or virtual room of your own. Everyone needs somewhere whether real or metaphorical which is their place to write. The famous British novelist, Virginia Woolf made the idea of “A Room of One’s Own” a truism in her eponymous 1928 novel. The idea is echoed in her earlier Novel To the Lighthouse where she writes of her main character’s need to create the scenario where she could write.

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For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of—to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others… and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. (Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse. 1927, np)

I think the idea that a room of your own leaves you free to have the strangest adventures is a beautiful way of thinking about inspiration and how you can set yourself up for it to work as part of the creative process. A room of your own may be quite literally the physical space, the room, you write in with either your journal or computer, or it may mean the social environment you grew up and live in shaped by the street, suburb, city, or country where you physically write. It could also be the cultural environment you grew up in, shaped by the family, friends, education, and culture where you have lived your life to date. It can be the metaphysical environment shaped by your passions and pleasures, including the music, books, mise-en-scène and architecture of your mental and physical space. It could be an environment in which you escape to write, whether a park bench, a commuter train, or seemingly every writer’s favorite, the café. Whatever and wherever it is, “a room of your own” is an important factor to consider in your life as a writer. While interviews with writers give us anecdotal evidence of the importance of “a room of one’s own” or a café for creating an environment in which to write, cognitive psychology research citing the environment as one of the multivariate factors in the Multivariate Model has shown that “physical and social stimulations and can help with the generation and maturation of ideas, thus reinforcing motivation” (Lubart 1999 in Botella et al. 2013, 162). One of the first things I ask my screenwriting students to do is to create a weekly schedule for their writing and dedicate a place that is their “room” of their own. This does not have to be a literal room but a space. For example, my dedicated creative space is a place I feel great in. I have a brightly colored office full of the things I love, a garden that I look out on, and a beautiful Mac computer. This is where I create. My place for editing is the kitchen table—kind of like this is where the knife does its work! Equally, however, I can write in cafès. But it has to be a cool café that I love and feel good in.

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In Samira Bourgeois-Bougrine and her colleagues’ research in “The Creativity Maze”, they found that some screenwriters  worked at home, some worked in cafès, or some worked in a production office: I work in cafes. At home I do the printing and the correction. But the first draft, it is never at home … In a café I have the feeling that I manage to be just a mind at work … at home, it is as if all defined myself too much as myself. (S3) (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 388–389)

Ritual and Reward To me, a room of your own is also emblematic of a time of your own. Time to write that no one can interfere with. I think it is really important when one is learning the craft of screenwriting to value yourself as a resource just like the resources of information and the ideas you research. If you want to create a career or creative pastime writing, you need to think about how you are going to maintain your energy and passion. Because let’s face it, writing is hard work. Ideas do not just flow from the tip of your pen or tap of your keyboard. Another thing I ask my students to do is to create a timetable for their writing and, as they are students, to treat it like a job. Creativity research has shown that intensive energy is required at the complex stage of idea generation. For me, in any one day is three hours max. If I have the luxury of, say, an eight-hour working day, the rest of the day is devoted to other parts of the creative process. Like going for a walk. Tidying my desk. And at the end attending to the administrative aspects of my job as a writer, like checking the contract to make sure the deadline has not changed or answering emails. In “The Creativity Maze”, Bourgeois-Bougrine and her colleagues’ research also found that this was the case for working screenwriters who combined everyday life with a writing life. The majority of participants commented on the fact that their professional and personal lives are intertwined doing things like shopping, cleaning, and picking up the kids from school (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 388–389). Among the participants who mentioned their working hours, the majority enjoyed the freedom and autonomy of not having to go every morning to an office and to be able to set their own times for working. However, despite this freedom, they all worked long hours (up to 15 hours per day) during the writing and rewriting phase (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 388–389).

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However, within this perceived freedom afforded by the life of a writer who does not appear to be tied to a life dictated by the nine-to-five clock, there are nonetheless routines that the writers interviewed adhered to. For example, one screenwriter described the importance of creating a ritual to start writing: I am starting a new project and currently I am turning around. It’s a kind of ritual: I am turning around the topic like wolf around its prey. (D18) (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 390)

The fact that writing is work that takes focus and organization and may even be part of a daily ritual is echoed by many writers. The famous novelist Stephen King underlines the importance of ritual and routine and a room of your own for writing: If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot… You can read anywhere, almost, but when it comes to writing library carrels, park benches, and rented flats should be courts of last resort—Truman Capote said he did his best writing in motel rooms, but he is an exception; most of us do our best in a place of our own. Until you get one, you’ll find your new resolution to write a lot harder to take seriously. The space can be humble … it really only needs one thing; a door which you are willing to shut. The closed door is your way of telling the world and yourself that you mean business; you have made a serious commitment to write and intend to walk the walk as well as talk the talk. By the time you step into your new writing space and close the door, you should have settled on a daily writing goal … With that goal set, resolve to yourself that door stays closed until that goal is met … the work is always accomplished one word at a time. (King 2000, 112–122)

Daydreaming, Dreaming, and Doing Automatic Tasks The place of dreaming and daydreaming is granted a special status in the creative process; again, this is usually illustrated by anecdote. In their 2018 research into the psychological processes involved in the various phases of screenwriting, Bourgeois-Bougrine and Glaveanu found that there were periods of apparent daydreaming, mind wandering, incubation, and procrastination (2018, 134). These findings were rigorously substantiated by case study interviews. Of interest to us are the observations that Bourgeois-­ Bougrine and Glaveanu make in this study aligning these behaviors during

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the various stages of screenwriting with neurology. For example, they propose that based on recognized research the “passive” state of mind wandering may be aligned with the findings of neuroimaging studies of the brain (Bourgeois-Bougrine and Glăveanu 2018, 134). They propose that daydreaming results in action in the associative cortices referred to as default networks (DNT). They quote research which proposes the adaptive role in these networks for “storing, retrieving and manipulating internal information”, and solving problems which require time to creating plans for future behaviors (2018, 134–135). They further cite research showing that the activation of the DNT has been associated with “constructing dynamic mental simulations based on personal past experiences such as used during remembering, thinking about the future, and generally imagining alternative scenarios to the present” (Bourgeois-Bougrine and Glăveanu 2018, 135). This is echoed by my student reflections: When I begin writing something new, I am trying to calm my thoughts so that all my usual ‘daily data’ can be pushed aside to enable the scene forming in my head to reveal itself with greater clarity. There is an intensity to my need to ‘see’ what is materializing from my unconscious… what symbolism or meaning is crystallising from the nexus of the external stimulus and the unresolved dynamic within me which yearns for written expression. (Student 2 2019)

While this may seem a lot to take in, let’s think about their findings more as this ties in nicely with what current neuroscience tells us is happening in the brain. Let’s take a step back. I bet you are saying to yourself, “so what?” But this is really interesting. I find that students can get really stressed when there are deadlines to meet, and they find themselves doing things that seemingly are not helpful to getting words on a page like cleaning their rooms, going shopping, or taking the dog for a walk. I believe that in our society unless we are “doing” something toward a goal, it may seem like we are procrastinating, whereas this is far from the case. In doing nothing we are giving our brain time to work really hard. Let’s see what is actually happening and why.

Creativity and the Unconscious Let’s think back to what we learnt in Chap. 3 regarding how creatives think. Basically, we took a broad-brush approach to how ideas are generated via association during the process of divergent thinking and then

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analysed and evaluated  during the process of convergent thinking. We came to understand that seminal ideas and information, much of which are influenced by experience, background, and culture, are stored in memories; and these ideas and concepts are stored in long-term memory. We considered how we can develop more ideas so we can make more associations by filling working memory, which is composed of both episodic memory—that which is filled by what is happening in our immediate environment, what we see, hear, and read, for example—and semantic memory—that which resonates with the experience of an event. We drilled down to the idea that connections are made in the brain from all this information. This fits in with what another of my students says of their process: I try to ignite my creativity by putting myself constantly in contact with artistic work—cinema, music, literature, fine arts—as well as spending time reading about philosophy, psychoanalysis and sociopolitical issues. I also read the newspaper every day. I enjoy experiencing things in my life, walking in the city and nature, talking to different people and listening what they have to say … All of these together, I believe help me to be more creative. Knowledge in general and curiosity are for me key qualities to be a good writer. (Student 1 2019)

Which Fish to Catch? So, this is the easy part. Getting the ideas. The harder part is understanding how we know “which” idea to develop. For this part, I am going to build a little more on our understanding of what happens in the brain when we think, by using a model of the four stages of divergent (expansive) and convergent (limiting) thinking that cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists Serena Mastria and her colleagues identify in their great chapter “Creative Brain, Creative Mind, Creative Person” in Zoe Kapoula and her colleagues’ edited book, Exploring Transdisciplinarity in Art and Sciences (2018). In this chapter, Mastria and her fellow researchers canvas all the contemporary and significant research in the area to give us a strong handle on the often-ephemeral thinking process of getting to the “aha” moment. Once we understand what happens as we go from that stage of not-enough ideas or too-many ideas, to where we have isolated the one idea we want to write about, the exercises in the “What if?” section of this chapter will make sense and can be used when you feel the need.

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So, let’s look at how we help our brain to do more of catching the fish we want and why it is okay to be procrastinating and doing tasks extraneous to the process—like cleaning!

As We May think … To a Point We’ve all experienced it. The Eureka moment. When suddenly the answer to the question is found, the feeling that this is what we want to write about. That certainty that may come as a sudden impulse or after what may be many hours of searching. On the surface, this moment appears effortless, and for the more intuitive or spiritual among us, it may appear to come to us from the muses. But in fact it is a moment that comes after much brain work, whether it be something that has been happening in the background in our brain over time, or something that is the result of short-term brain work. In coming to this Eureka moment, we are moving through and between the phases of divergent to convergent thinking. Mastria and her colleagues articulate these phases as a multipart process in the chapter, “Creative Brain, Creative Mind, Creative Person”. They underline that insight is not a sudden moment but a process that evolves over time. The first phase Mastria and her colleagues identify by canvassing EEG research is what they call “insightful convergent thinking” (Mastria et al. 2018, 14). It is the phase where we are thinking about what we are supposed to be thinking about—the stages in convergent thinking that lead to what appears to be a sudden insight. They call this “the mental impasse” and note that it may involve “excessive focus on inappropriate problem representations” where we are basically trying things out to see if they work, and our “internal attention demand is highly charged by unsuccessful solutions that must be stored in working memory (to avoid repetition over time). Because working memory is limited, attention serves as a gatekeeper that, however, could potentially cause a mental impasse, because of an overload” (Mastria et al. 2018, 14). So, no wonder we can get tired when we are trying to find the answer to what to write about or what to write  next in  our story! After this, Mastria and her colleagues identify the second phase, which “is a deeper understanding”, which is “identifying the correct solutions” with low frequencies of brain activity. Then there is the third phase which “requires a re-structuring of the problem”. EEG studies show that there is a lot happening as measured by what is called “alpha band activity” which “is highly associated with the planning of open-ended problems, and therefore the conscious restructuring

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of a problem” (Mastria et al. 2018, 14). The final phase that Mastria et al. identify from the literature is “the suddenness of the solution” which “appears immediately before the solution response, has been associated with the conscious retrieval of the solution from working memory” (Mastria et al. 2018, 14). I am going to unpack these stages a little more step-by-step because to think about them like this is to empower us to know what we can do more of at each stage. I am also going to illustrate this discussion with thoughts from my screenwriting students that illuminate the scientific research. The first stage that Mastria and her colleagues identify can be aligned with what we know as brainstorming or gathering ideas. All the time we are doing this, the brain is encoding new information and processing information that already exists in our brain, usually in long-term memory, but also in working memory if we have been doing research or opening ourselves to experience. Bourgeois Bougrine and her colleagues’ 2014 research  in  “The Creativity Maze” substantiates this. In their interviews with screenwriters about the sources of information, inspiration, and the mental processes involved in the creative process, they found that the sources of inspiration are those that we may call references in screenwriting, including visual and written material, “reading books, magazines, newspapers, archives” and viewing films and documentaries, “visiting art galleries, looking at photos”,” human behavior and physical appearance” of others like actors, politicians, or strangers and other sources of inspiration, including “chance, hazard, and unexpected events”, as well as desires, “introspection, intuition, instinct” and other unconscious and mental processes, including “imagination, dreaming incubation, thinking, reflection” (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 387). As we are seeking inspiration, to help us understand why it is good to group ideas, for example in brainstorming exercises where using a highlighter pen we circle or color code ideas regarding theme, character, or location, cognitive psychologist Robert Sternberg summarizes three types of processing phases our brain goes through as we collect, sort, and use ideas awaiting insight: (1) selective encoding that selects the important information, filtering out the irrelevant ones; (2) selective combination that keeps in mind significant information in order to combine it in a new point of view; and (3) selective comparison that links new information with old knowledge. (Sternberg 2005 in Mastria et al. 2018, 13)

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Again, this process is echoed in my student’s reflections on what works for them at the inspiration stage: My inspiration usually comes from assorted images and ideas that I collect. These ideas are often caused when reading articles about topics that are new to me. It might be a single line  … I also collect images in a folder, that ranges from paintings, to photographs, film stills, ads, posters and architecture. However, more than any one picture by itself, I enjoy the Gestalt of the folder, with wildly differing tones, and a clash of high art, low brow art, and non-art. The connections between the images is often what inspires me rather than what each image is but itself. In the broadest sense, I am interested in meaning-making, and how disparate elements suggest or create certain meanings and feeling. (Student 3 2021)

Right Brain Go/Left Brain Stop: Intuitive Thinking Contemporary research has also shown that different  regions of the brain work together during the creative process and that no one region is responsible for a specific task. However, one or the other regions may work either  more or less  during the interconnected processes of idea generation and idea evaluation. Mastria and her colleagues note that “ideation is not an isolated phase in the creative process but that it works dynamically in joint action with other components, such as the evaluation of ideas”, which in turn helps to develop or enrich ideas (2018, 12). Importantly, as we will see later in terms of not stressing but just letting the brain do its thing, they note, “This activity could be related to the absence of a stimulus-driven, external bottom-up stimulation, or rather, to a top-down activity driven by internal attention” (Mastria et  al. 2018, 12). Despite the contemporary research showing that regions of the brain work in tandem as above, there has been a lot of conjecture about right-­ brain versus left-brain processes in popular anecdote about creativity. One of the most influential and interesting explorations of this idea can be seen in Betty Edwards’ seminal text Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain which I mentioned in Chap. 2. This was one of the first books I read when I was researching creativity. In the “What If?” section of Chap. 2, we considered Edwards’ classic experiment drawing the vase with our nondominant hand to ask us to see if we can feel a switch in our brain. I am not going to try to prove or disprove Edwards’ paradigm, except to say it worked for me so I suppose you could say I am a believer. Likewise, the

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Spinning Ballerina Illusion, an optical illusion easily sourced via a web search, calls for the observer to cause the ballerina to change directions by simply thinking about getting her to change directions. Again, this worked for me. And again, it works for some of my students and does not work for others. The takeaway here is that I emphasize that it is important to use what works for you. Remember the importance of independent thinking for the successful creative! However, in defence of what works for me, fairly recent neuroscientific research in the face of naysayers has more or less demonstrated that there could be something in the right-brain/left-brain adage. Some of my favorite researchers, Mathias Benedek and his colleagues, showed through MRI studies that there was activity in specific regions of the brain that one could equate with heavy lifting being done. In their work, they use the EEG, which measures oscillations in the frequency of brain activity divided into bands of frequency. Frequencies in what is called “the alpha band (8–12Hz) have been found to be specifically related to higher cognitive abilities such as divergent thinking” (Mastria et al. 2018, 11). Specifically, Mastria et al. summarize Benedek’s 2014 work noting: The increase of alpha activity over the parietal regions (in particular in the right hemisphere) might be associated with the strength of task-focused attention rather than reflecting only the direction of the attention (internal vs external). According to this interpretation, alpha increase in the right parietal region might be read as an indicator of the depth of an ongoing mental imagination process, representing therefore a valid indicator of the cognitive process specific for creative cognition and in particular for divergent thinking … The reason why alpha activity during divergent thinking is more pronounced in the right than in the left posterior parietal regions is today a question that still needs to be answered. (Mastria et al. 2018, 11)

In recapping the march toward associating right brain with creative thinking and left brain with more analytical (think editing) thinking, Mastria et al. go on to say: The right hemisphere has been suggested to be related to a parallel or holistic processing mode, in contrast to the more sequential and analytical mode of the left hemisphere. More recently, the left hemisphere has been associated with fine semantic coding processes, whereas the right hemisphere seems to be associated with a more sketchy semantic coding characterized by a diffuse activation of alternative or more distant associations … This

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function of the right hemisphere seems therefore to be particularly important in divergent thinking, which is indeed the ability to generate many alternative solutions in the search of the most original one. (Mastria et al. 2018, 12)

So, what does this mean for us on the ground? Basically, we are doing a lot of idea generation. Lots of work. Potential brain fog. This is what Bourgeois-Bougrine and her colleagues found in their diary analysis in “The Creativity Maze” (2014). We are storing this information in working memory—but look at what the scientists say—working memory is limited and can be overloaded. We could appear to have mental blocks because there is just too much stuff running around in our brains. You know the feeling? I certainly do. I love that Bourgeios-Bougrine called this “walking in fog”. So, we know this is what is happening. The next step is to understand how we can be in control of our thinking and, I believe, to ultimately choose the best ideas by, for example, giving our brains a rest when it needs and making sure we don’t stress too much at the time, as background thinking work is part of the creative process.

Memory: Our Creative Well What is a memory and how can we use it? In his 2021 book How We Learn, cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene 2021 provides a concise and insightful summary of what goes on in the brain when we make and use a memory. “Each of our perceptions, actions, and thoughts relies on the activity of a specific set of neurons (while others remain inactive or even inhibited). The identity of these active neurons, distributed in many regions of the brain, defines the content of our thoughts” “Single neurons may provide some information, but the overall memory is always encoded by several interconnected groups of neurons” (Dehaene 2021, 89). The example Dehaene uses is of a person seeing a famous and recognizable face where some of our encoded neurons may respond to facial recognition (in the superior temporal region of the brain); some may respond to voice prompts (in the superior temporal region of the brain) and some may respond to spatial prompts (in the parahippocampal region of the brain). He explains how a more complex synaptic memory is formed by the firing of the synapses (Dehaene 2021, 89). Dehaene summarizes research into four kinds of memories:

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Working memory: This memory is short term and task based (like recording a telephone number on your mobile). A memory here never lasts more than a few seconds as the brain needs a buffer to keep in mind the newest most important information (Dehaene 2021, 91). Episodic memory: This memory “records the unfolding episodes of our daily lives. Neurons in the hippocampus seem to memorize the context of each event: they encode where, when, how, and with whom things happened. They store each episode through synaptic changes, so we can remember it later” (Dehaene 2021, 91). Semantic memory: “Memories do not seem to stay in the hippocampus forever. At night, the brain plays them back and moves them to a new location within the cortex. There, they are transformed into permanent knowledge” (Dehaene 2021, 91). Procedural memory: “When we repeat the same activity over and over again … neurons in the cortex and other subcortical circuits eventually … This is procedural memory: the compact, unconscious recording of patterns of routine activity” (Dehaene 2021, 91–92). Liane Gabora and Apara Ranjan, in their 2013 article, give us more insight here. They outline the established characteristics of memory supported by years of research. Basically memories are encoded across an array of various neurons that are sensitive to ranges (or values) so no one memory exists in one place so that in effect “representations that share features are encoded in overlapping distributions of neurons which they call “distributed content-addressable architecture of memory” (2013, 22). Basically, when you create something new, it is a combination of what already exists given a unique and original spin. You can’t think without material to think with. When we create new ideas, we are combining thoughts and ideas stored in long-term memory with thoughts and ideas from short-term or episodic memory, plus if we factor in what Bourgeois Bougrine and Glaveneau found the chance event, or serendipity, we are combining unforeseen information. It all seems pretty simple when I put it like that but, again, unless we know that it is happening, it can be so random and haphazard. Let’s think about how we can be more directed and time effective in our thinking by working with what we have already got and what we know we need to find out about in a strategic manner. Here is what one of my student says is happening at this stage of convergent thinking, which illustrates how we are thinking while drawing on inspiration and memory as we await the trigger of insight:

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I draw heavily on my memories and life experience to inspire my creative work. Often an internal tension or unresolved memory triggers the impulse to write. Sometimes if I am “stuck” I will return to my family photo albums and immerse myself in photos from past eras, which somehow resonates with the character’s plight in my current screenwriting. Sometimes I will use Mixbook photo software to create elaborate photobooks of an era or year in my life. Immersing myself in the past images evokes a nostalgia and an internal emotional clarity which allows me to recrystallize away from current stress but to appreciate … who I am, the message I want to communicate. Creating new designs with old photos triggers a new perspective on my current plight and screenwriting. This helps me to return to my screenwriting with renewed clarity, vigor and inspiration. (Student 2 2019)

Taking a Moment While the brief of this book is not to give you a lesson in neuroscience (you can look up all the research if you want to find out the Latin names of the brain that are involved in the processes above), the aim is to help you understand that seeking inspiration is a complex (but fun) process, and it deserves attention and work to get the best ideas upon which to build your story. In Chap. 3, we briefly considered how new ideas are generated. In this chapter, we have been delving a little more into the scientific research mentioned in terms of a specific stage of  the creative process—Inspiration and Envisioning. As I have said so many times already (sorry but this is new research): I believe we can understand why we need to do certain things at certain times and why, for example, after we have had a solid session of working on idea generation, we can feel really tired (and happy), or why we might find it handy to seemingly switch off for a moment and go for a walk or hang out the washing or perhaps listen to that meditation app. So now we will go to the next chapter, where we talk a little more about making that brain work around a specific idea or theme or intuition after you have found insight. While cognitive psychology and neuroscientific research refer to this search for new ideas via the processes of divergent and convergent thinking, as “problem-solving” (I don’t agree with this as I feel the word problem has negative connotations and I prefer to use a more positive expression), it nonetheless gives us understanding as we will see in the next chapter.

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But let’s take a break first and try one of the exercises below to switch on that right brain (if this concept works for you) or to tap into random inspirations for your creative work.

What If? 1. Café Silhouette: (Enhancing Short-Term Memory) The great Polish screenwriter, Kryzsztof Piesiewicz says of his inspiration process: “If I want to explore a theme, loneliness for example, I will not take some relevant newspaper anecdote and then develop it into a script. Instead, I will look for those protagonists that best express my idea. I do not know how I pick these characters; maybe it is by intuition. They could be young or old, male or female, but once I have found them, I will live with them and spend time with them. Only then can I know what they will do. As I write the script, I will never assume or foresee what will happen to my characters. Rather, I write it scene-by-scene as if I myself am living this life. Only then will it be credible” (Piesiewicz 2003, 127). Be like Piesiewicz. Look for those protagonists that may best express your themes or ideas. Sit in a café. Draw the silhouette of someone who interests you. Use this silhouette as a sort of mind map of who they are or what is going on in their minds. Give them a name. Create a back story for the person. Why they are there? What does their imagined life suggest to you to explore? Spend time with your imaginary characters as you write your screenplay just like Piesiewicz does and see what happens! 2. Found Poetry (Creating New Associations) Write or make a found poem as an inspiration starter. A “found poem” is one that is created using only headings, words or phrases, or sentences that have been chosen and rearranged from another text. Use a pair of scissors (or some other way like taking a photo on your phone) to cut or snap lines from a flyer, old newspaper, or magazine; this is a good start. To create found poems, choose language that is particularly meaningful or interesting to you and organize the language around a theme or message. I find this works best if you cut and paste the lines onto a sheet of paper so that you have something tactile to look at and dream upon.

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3. Capturing Dream Images (Tapping the Unconscious) Keep a dream journal. It is best to have it beside your bed and jot down what you remember as soon as you wake up. The gift of the dream story is that it does not have to be logical; indeed, it can be surreal. If you record the fragments of your dreams over a few weeks or months, you may see certain elements that can make a story crystalize. The essence of the dream story can lead you to write poetically and in nonlinear form while including metaphor and imagery as central to the story. If you want to see examples of really successful films that are dreamlike, look at the work of David Lynch. Or go even further to the great avant-garde filmmakers of the 1940s like the American Maya Deren or the avant-garde artists and filmmakers of the 1920s, including the Surrealist work of Salvador Dali and Luis Buneul in Un Chien Andalou, which vigorously resists interpretation. Don’t be afraid to experiment with what the great film theorist David Bordwell terms “parametric narration” in his 1985 book Narration and the Fiction Film. The essence of the avant-garde film is theme and repetition or, as Bordwell says, an individual in a boundary situation where the film is what we experience as if it were their own subconscious. Go deeper and analyze Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon as an example of this. Work out the pattern and then choose a climatic event, and pattern your story like Deren’s. Hers is the purported death of a lover (we are not sure whose death it is, the male’s or the female’s) and the retelling of the event from the point of view of a number of different dreamers who appear to be the female lover herself. The main thing is to be open and have fun and use metaphor and imagery.

References Bordwell, David. 1985. Narration and the Fiction Film. Madison Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. Botella, Marion; Glaveanu, Vlad; Zenasni, Franck; Storme, Martin; Myszkowski, Nils; Wolff, Marion and Lubart, Todd. 2013. How artists create: Creative process and multivariate factors. Learning and Individual Differences 26: 161–170. Bourgeois-Bougrine, Samira, and Vlad P.  Glăveanu. 2018. Collaborative Scriptwriting: Social and Psychological Factors. In The Creative Process: Perspectives from Multiple Domains, Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture, ed. Todd Lubart, 123–154. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan UK.

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Bourgeois-Bougrine, Samira, Vlad Glaveanu, Marion Botella, K. Guillou, P.M. de Biasi, and Todd Lubart. 2014. The Creativity Maze: Exploring Creativity in Screenplay Writing. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 8 (4): 384–399. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0037839. Bunuel, Luis. 1929. Un Chien Andalou. DVD. Dannenbaum, Jed, Carroll Hodge, and Doe Mayer. 2010. Creative Filmmaking from the Inside Out: Five Keys to the Art of Making Inspired Movies and Television. New York: Touchstone. Dehaene, Stanislas. 2021. How We Learn. The New Science of Education and the Brain. London, UK: Penguin Random House. Deren, Maya. 1943. Meshes of the Afternoon. Maya Deren Experimental Films. DVD. Gabora, Liane, and Apara Ranjan. 2013. “How Insight Emerges in a Distributed Content-Addressable Memory” in Neuroscience of Creativity. 2013. Edited by Oshin Vartanian, A.S. Bristol, and C. Kaufman, 19–43. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Hoag, Tami. 1995. Dark Paradise. Orion. Author’s note. King, Stephen. 2000. On Writing. A Memoir of the Craft. Great Britain: Hodder and Stoughton. Lynch, David. 1997. Lost Highway. DVD. Criterion Films. Mastria, Serena, Sergio Agnoli, Marco Zanon, Todd Lubart, and Giovanni Emanuele Corazza. 2018. Creative Brain, Creative Mind, Creative Person. In Exploring Transdisciplinarity in Art and Sciences, ed. Zoi Kapoula et  al. Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-­3-­319-­76054-­4_1. Piesiewicz,  Kryzsztof. 2003. in  McGrath, D., and F.  MacDermott. 2003. Screencraft: Screenwriting. Mies: RotoVision. 126–138. Student 1. 2019. Griffith Film School, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia. Student 2. 2019. Griffith Film School, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia. Student 3. 2021. Griffith Film School, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia. Woolf, Virginia. 1927. To the Lighthouse. @ Project Gutenberg Australia. https:// gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100101h.html. Accessed May 2, 2023. ———. 1928. A Room of One’s Own. Penguin Modern Classics. UK: Penguin.

CHAPTER 6

Catching the Big Fish: Research and Insight

Abstract  This chapter focuses on the Research and Insight stage of the screenwriting creative process and the key personal and practical factors, including doing the hard yards of research needed to be ready to write the first draft of a screenplay. It applies findings from cognitive neuroscience about the process of creative cognition and how we draw ideas from short-­ term and long-term memory to create original stories. To do this it investigates what is happening in our brain when we make creative decisions. One of the most powerful tools for screenwriting is to research and study the work of filmmakers whose work inspires the writer. To this end the power of studying the work of the masters in screenwriting and other artistic fields as a source of inspiration and reference is considered. This chapter also considers how to fine-tune the research via insight or that “eureka”, “ah ha”, or “lightbulb” moment. To do this it considers concepts from screenwriting theory including the dramatic center, as well as concepts from  cognitive psychology regarding metaphor as the highest level of analogical thinking, to crystallize core themes and universal meanings as drivers of the screenplay  story.  The work of the chapter is

Work in Progress Creative Process Stage: Research and Insight Craft Stage: Working Title, One Liner, Synopsis, Character Back Story, Dramatic Centre © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. McVeigh, Screenwriting from the Inside Out, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40520-4_6

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encapsulated under the framework heading “Work in Progress” which crystallizes the relevant stage of thinking and writing like a creative. The “Creative Process Stage” explores key creativity theory and the “Craft Stage” backgrounds key screenwriting theory. The “What If?” section of the chapter is a concluding coda of three activities for thinking and writing like a creative, drawn from the ideas developed in the chapter. Keywords  Screenwriting • Creativity • Creative process • Research • Insight • Metaphor Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and they’re abstract. And they’re very beautiful. (Lynch 2007, 1) Little fish swim on the surface, but big ones swim down below. If you can expand the container you’re fishing in—your consciousness—you can catch bigger fish. (Lynch 2007, 27)

On the Road to Find Out So, you’ve done it all. In some way, you have found out the core of what it is you want to write about. You’ve gathered some ideas. You’ve collected images. You feel the power and the passion of knowing what you want to write about. Now you just have to dig a bit deeper to make your story richer and, in the long run, effortless to write, because you will do the research. But the problem in sorting through the ideas to find the most inspiring for the project at hand, is difficult. In the maelstrom of information you have gathered, one has to make a decision about “which” idea to develop. Maybe time for a walk… In the following sections, we are going to consider all the elements that come into play at this stage where in fact you need to hone exactly what it is you want to write about and pitch an idea either to yourself or to collaborators, most likely via a set of working documents including the synopsis. You literally need to rein in the ideas and start putting thoughts into words. While there is not necessarily a fine-tuned order about how things

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happen in this, and indeed any stage of the creative process, nonetheless there are certain things we can do to make sure we set ourselves us for telling a truly original and compelling story.

What is Research? When I started my research into creativity, I thought that only certain people had great ideas. I thought these were people who had some sort of God-given talent. The more I read about how creative people got their ideas, the more I learnt that ideas did not just appear out of nowhere. This really struck home to me when I read interviews with famous fashion designers about how they got their inspiration and did their research. Taking a walk through nature is a big one. And now I understand why. I am not a birdwatcher, but each day as I take my morning bike ride I see the birds of the wetlands near me, and the colors of their plumage are perfect. Gray and white and the wonderful acid yellow-green of the noisy miner. Brown and beige and the beautiful hidden teals of the duck-wing undercarriage. Black and white of the magpie in just the correct proportions. I realize that as I see the colors of nature, it is easy for a fashion designer or anyone to be inspired by the nature’s palette. The same goes if you travel to another culture. Take the architecture of the Iberian cultures of Europe with their mélange of Arab, English, and Gothic influences. A beautiful new art form inspired by other cultures. So, when I reached this realization that inspiration did not come to me from an intangible source, I embraced the role of research fully. The great filmmaker, Francis Ford Coppola advises emerging filmmakers to “steal from the best” (2019). He does not mean to literally steal and try to pass it off as your own, but he does mean to learn from the best, the masters. Emulate them, take what you see as the best inspirations from them and make them your own by creating new and original combinations and contexts. So, let’s take a trip into the wonderful world of research and how to use it at this stage of the creative process!

Learning from the Masters The Renaissance marks a period of history when craft guilds were formed. Artists were apprenticed to acclaimed masters, and it was acknowledged that part of learning your craft was copying from these masters as you completed your apprenticeship. Michelangelo’s great work did not arrive fully

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formed without him training in his craft by learning from great works that had gone before him. So too can you learn your craft this way. View the films you love. Read the scripts of the films you love. This is research. In filmmaking, we call this citing the references for a work that you have not yet created. Sometimes you will create a mood board or AV of images taken from or inspired by these works to create the look and feel of what you would like to make. This is legitimate, and it is used so someone can imagine what your work might be like. Let’s say you want to tell a contemporary dark psychological story about a young woman who has led a cloistered existence and who is torn between religious duty and love but, at the same time, make a comment on society and the corruption of governments or institutions. You want to give your story a Gothic edge. You could say it’s a dark story where Pawlikowski’s Ida meets Bunuel’s Viridiana but told through the eyes of a character like Rebecca in Hitchcock’s Rebecca. Or, for example, there is a scene you envisage for your story where we first see a character introduced like a femme fatale. To study the masters, you could research one of the original noir films like The Postman Always Rings Twice or later films inspired by this film including Fatal Attraction or Body Heat. You could look at the relevant scenes and study the scripts and interpret them to emulate aspects that speak to you when you introduce the femme fatale character in your story. Then you could write a scene where a character is introduced using the patterns of writing you learnt from your research. If you want to write like Sam Shepard or David Lynch, use one of your favorite scenes from their scripts to transplant to your writing. If you want to embellish and go for broke, look at Oliver Stone. There is no need to hide that you have references from a canon of great and inspiring films; this is all a part of the process of learning your craft, like the greats who have done before you. Fill your notebooks with research based on this work, and soon it will become second nature.

Doing the Hard Yards Part of the research and insight stage is knowing how you work as a writer and what tools you need to have in place, as we saw in the section on a “Room of Your Own”, so you can write your best work. The Danish film researcher and script-writing academic, Eva Novrup Redvall, has investigated the factors that created the successful careers of many of the graduates of the Danish Film School who with Danish television, were the creators of the world-famous Nordic Noir TV genre. She found that

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research was one of the key factors in creating this successful genre. For example, at the research and insight stage the writers of the award-­winning Lille Soldat (Little Soldier) (2008) describe it as a “stage of mess-finding” of “structuring your problem-solving efforts to identify and accept a challenge … a decision of genre was an initial guiding principle, but an agreement … was made about the overall aim of the process”; they said, “we have to learn something. We have to get involved in public debate. We have to get involved in the Danish reality” (Aakeson, 2008  in Redvall 2008, 41). “This initial ‘massaging’ of the situation … is the process of finding out what to actually make a film about. Decisions were made from the outset regarding the choice of genre, a desire to learn something, and a strategy to turning reality as a source of inspiration for a potential story, guiding the research towards topics involving aspects of crime and conflict” (Redvall 2008, 42). One of the writers she interviewed, Olesen, commented on essential nature of research, “I wouldn’t go into a story … without being absolutely sure of what we are saying is, if not the actual truth, then at least a plausible version of it. I have to feel a certainty in my gut that we aren’t just making up a story that more or less resembles newspaper headlines” (in Redvall, 2008, 42). Another writer, Aakeson, whom she interviewed, described the research stage as “essential in providing ‘gifts’ in terms of elements that one could never have made up sitting behind a desk, and by challenging the classic dramatic structures and routines that one has a tendency to automatically cling to” (in Redvall, 2008, 42). In the field of psychology research, the great master, Csikszentmihalyi, cements the idea that rather than merely backgrounding or validating ideas research  opens new possibilities. For example, when studying the process of painters, Csikszentmihalyi and Getzels noted that “closure of the problem must be delayed if a creative solution is to emerge; that a person who does not explore different methods of solution might transform a new idea into an old routine; and that changing elements and introducing new combinations—that is, going beyond the information given—is more likely to contribute to an original solution” (Csikszentmihalyi and Getzels, 1976, 90 in Redvall 44). So, it is important to remember that the research stage is about opening ideas, and in fact it can be ongoing; for example, Redvall (2008, 49), in the collaboration between writer and director, says, “the material is kept open for a longer period of time, generating ideas and input that challenges … routines” (Redvall 2008, 49).

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I have found that students either can get bogged down in too much research because they are too scared to write their story, for whatever reason, or on the other hand do not do any research because they think they will be able to power through on what they know. This could be the case for some but that is usually because unknowingly one has already “done” a lot of research. Indeed, it was the case for Callie Khouri in her groundbreaking script for the film Thelma and Louise, which told the story of two women who went on the run to escape their ordinary lives. It seems she just sat down and wrote the screenplay in two weeks. But if you read any interviews with Khouri about the genesis of this story, you will find out that the story was actually incubating for many years as she worked in the film industry. Likewise, many first-time screenwriters and filmmakers are able to write a story because they already know it because it is a family story or something they have lived. Again, this is great but Screen Australia, the Australian screen industry film funding body which, as part of its remit funds the development of scripts and the work of first-time filmmakers, has found that the industry is littered with first-time writer/directors who never make another film. This is where I believe the knowledge of craft and the things you need to know about the creative process to write a story is invaluable, and will give you the tools to make a career in the industry as a writer. In the following sections, we will consider things that have been found to be important to writers across the board based on information ranging from personal anecdote to laboratory research.

Turning the Pages of Research There are lots of definitions of “research”. I like to think of the word itself. The idea of the “search” and then the prefix “re”, which has the Latin meaning of “back or again”. So, in research we are searching and searching so that we can create something new and original. (Remembering we are creative types with a great “tolerance for ambiguity” so we keep on going even though may not be getting anywhere near the answer!) Research is important as it gives us new information to work with in our quest to write a story and create something original. This is of course information that may or may not relate to the ideas we think we are going to explore but as this is at the searching stage, we just keep on going till we have enough information to give us some answers. As Kaufman and Gregoire say of this stage in their great book Wired to Create:

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To break free from traditional ways of thinking and labeling, one must ‘bombard the brain with new experiences’, which forces a reevaluation of existing categories and a creation of new connections. Changing perception is critical for the generative stage of creativity, when the artist is seeking out new ideas. (Kaufman and Gregoire 2016, 183)

Scandinavian creativity coach Thea Mikkelsen also reminds us that at the research stage we are searching for new information, that in effect gels with what we already know and who we already are. This is why what you write is unique. Mikkelsen cites Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky’s idea of creative expression as being a personal internal process of external experience and learning and culture and the rendering of new creative expression (Mikkelsen 2020, 42): To make externalizations from internalizations, we use the cultural store of expressive possibilities and the individual creative resources we have in our minds. The way in which we internalize and externalize the culture around us is limited by our individual observations and practical skills … creativity is expressions of our personal impressions of what we experience in the world around us. (Mikkelsen 2020, 42–43)

What is most interesting for us is that that Kaufman and Gregoire propose that creative people have a unique gift. They have “the ability to see something in reality that others haven’t noticed and to make that something fun or interesting”. “This might be something quite small… The world is so infinitely full of meaning and we can perceive this meaning in many different ways—if only we are aware. This awareness is what cognitive psychologists call creative perception” (Kaufman and Gregoire 2015, 182–3 in Mikkelsen 2020, 43). In Chap. 2, we explored the scientific research around how we think, and we considered the current research from psychology that demonstrates that the brain creates new ideas by association. We have also considered scientific research from neuroscience, which tells us that different parts of the brain are working to create these new ideas. To use the idea of water as a simple analogy, we have thought about the fact that we have an underground well of experience, ideas, and information potentially buried deep in long-term memory. Likewise, we have rivers and streams of new ideas which we experience in our day-to-day life or as we work through the first stages of the creative process including inspiration, and what we consider in this chapter, Research and Insight.

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So, how true is this awareness that research during the generative stage of creativity is important from both a scientific and a craft perspective? While we have looked at generating new ideas from a neuroscientific perspective, this is just one lens into the research. In his article, “Creative cognition as a window on creativity”, Thomas B. Ward used an approach called “creative cognition”, which helps us to consider how research is incorporated into our creative thinking. Ward notes that “an important feature of the creative cognition approach is the specificity with which it characterises both the nature of basic cognitive processes and how they operate on knowledge structures to produce original and task appropriate ideas” (Ward 2007, 36). In a review of the studies around important issues to consider during creative cognition, he discusses how this approach allows a more complex conception of creativity—it proposes that cognition relies on accessing stored knowledge at different levels of abstraction—a common way is to retrieve or find examples of earlier solutions and pattern new solutions after them, “people will tend to approach creative generation tasks by retrieving one or more specific known instances of the relevant conceptual domain and projecting the properties of those instances onto their novel creation” (Ward 2007, 30). He goes on to say that for creative accomplishments the combining of previously separate elements “such that new properties, discoveries, or insights emerge from the combination that would not have been expected from a consideration of the separate elements” (Ward 2007, 34). In the next section we are going to dive deeper into what the brain is actually doing as we gather new ideas through research and how we ultimately decide what ideas we will use in our screenwriting. Again, the long-­ term goal in learning how creatives think is to understand what works and how we can consciously tap into the process to make us think better. Fishing for those Deep Fish: Idea Generation and Idea Evaluation In their chapter in “Creative Brain, Creative Mind, Creative Person”, Serena Mastria and her colleagues again give us an elegant and insightful overview of the increasing body of creativity research into what is happening in the brain as we generate and evaluate ideas during the research stage of the creative process (2018, 10). Put simply, in the early stages of research the brain is involved in goal-directed divergent thinking to generate new ideas usually informed by the task on hand (like a truth that we know we want to explore, a family story we want to unveil, or a working

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hypothesis). Research in this area has investigated diverse cognitive processes including memory and attention. During divergent thinking, our brain is open to collecting many different ideas, which sometimes seem serendipitous, but it is actually because we have our internal radar out searching for ideas because we are involved in what Mastria and her colleagues call a “goal directed” task (2018, 9). On the other hand, at the same time the brain is evaluating the usefulness and potential originality of these ideas, leaving our attention open, focusing on what we need to find to catch those “deep fish”. The work the brain is doing is oscillating between one function and the other. This requires focus and flexibility. Mastria and her colleagues also found that “Depending on the degree of goal-directedness of a specific divergent thinking task, a different level of cooperation between the default and executive control brain networks has been found” (Mastria et al. 2018, 90). Without going into the detail of the names of the components of each of these networks, briefly the default network “seems to be mainly engaged in self-generated thought, possibly derived from long-term memory” (Mastria et  al. 2018, 90). While the executive control network “is specifically recruited during conditions of high cognitive control, such as strategic and/or controlled functions (i.e., directed attention, working memory, and relational integration” (Mastria et al. 2018, 9–10). They go on to note that “in divergent thinking, the spontaneous generation of candidate ideas, which entails the involvement of episodic memory retrieval and mind wandering … shows greater activation of the default network, compared to the executive control network. The key role of the default network was clearly observed during a task in which participants were asked to spontaneously generate novel ideas, in contrast to the mere recollection of old ideas from memory” (Mastria et al. 2018, 10). Interestingly Mastria and her colleagues significantly found that this “dynamic functional connectivity between the executive control network and the default network in highly creative individuals has been reported in a number of neuroimaging studies” (Mastria et al. 2018, 10). So, the better you concentrate on the task on hand by continually focusing on and evaluating ideas as you research, the more potential you have to be highly creative! Why have I taken the time to detail these processes? Mastria and her colleagues overview many years of research until the present day to illuminate what the current thinking is around how the brain works to retrieve ideas from long-term working memory, to be open to ideas gathered from more short-term episodic memory and mind wandering, and to note that

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the default network which research shows is operational in what we sometimes consider the more intuitive or unconscious processes of being open to inspiration, as well as the more focused and controlled processes of the executive control network, which seemingly does the heavy lifting during directed attention and deliberate thinking about what we already know and have learnt about either a topic or our craft. This sounds pretty simple really. All the parts of the brain are cooperating as they should to generate new and original ideas. While I have been using research from cognitive psychology and neuroscience to unpack these processes so we can make sense of the creative exercises in the “What if?” section, we probably need to recap to bring this all together in layman’s terms before we move to the next step of the creative process during the research stage.

Imagination and Imagining In their 2016 book Wired to Create Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire, note the importance of the neuroscientific research into what the default mode network (or as they call it, the “imagination” network) is doing as a paradigm shift in cognitive neuroscience research directing its focus on external task performance to “the more nebulous yet omnipresent phenomenon of inner experience [sic]” in understanding how the creative mind works (Kaufman and Gregoire 2016, xxvii). Kaufman and Gregoire give us a beautiful insight into why the “imagination network” is so important to us to value as “creatives”. In the teaching of screenwriting, one of the most important aspects of setting yourself up to be a successful writer who is creative and has a strong personal voice, is to understand what makes you unique, as we discussed in Chap. 2 of this book. Kaufman and Gregoire emphasize how the default mode network underlines this, saying: The processes associated with this brain network make us each unique and help breathe meaning into our lives. In fact, the functions of the imagination network form the very core of human experience. Its three main components—personal meaning making, mental simulation, and perspective taking—often work together when we’re engaged in what researchers call ‘self-generated cognition’ … the imagination network enables us to construct personal meaning from our experiences, remember the past, think about the future, imagine other perspectives and scenarios, comprehend stories, and reflect on mental and emotional states—both our own and those of others. (Kaufman and Gregoire 2016, xxviii)

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But this beautiful model begs the question: How do we decide which ideas we will develop? How do we know what will keep our passion and focus intact for the long journey of writing a screenplay? What will crystallize all those nebulous thoughts, ideas, information, and images gleaned from our research? How do we know what the litmus test is going to be to go with one idea for a story and not the other? As discussed in Chap. 2, we have to decide on answers to these questions to tie down ideas drawn from inspiration so we could move onto the next stage of research. We used the term the “eureka” or “ah ha” moment to cryztallize this notion. Basically, this is the notion of insight that leads to a creative decision. As Mastria and her colleagues remind us, “The main difference between divergent and convergent thinking processes is that in the former we explore many possible solutions to generate creative ideas, whereas in the latter we need to converge to a unique solution (possibly creative) for a given problem” (Mastria et al. 2018, 12). So, this is why we are cycling through the process of divergent and convergent thinking as we think creatively (in fact through all the stages of the creative process, but most likely more so during the Inspiration and Envisioning and Research and Insight stages). Eureka—I’ve got it! (And Before That) In the field of psychology research insight, the “eureka!” or “aha!” experience” (Mastria et al. 2018, 12) is regarded as a specific form of creative thinking and is in fact, as we would understand, highly subjective. Mastria and her colleagues note: The role of insight in creativity research has been widely discussed, as the feeling of insight is extremely subjective and is not necessarily the most important determinant in problem solving. Problems can be indeed unravelled through different strategies, such as deliberate research schemes or retrieving old memory information, which gradually lead to the right solution. (Mastria et al. 2018, 12–13)

Mastria and her colleagues note that in the field of neuroscience, the investigation of insight is difficult because there are so many laboratory-­ based tests that point to the solving of a problem. However, of interest to us is that they do note that many brain regions such as “higher cognitive functions, including sustained attention and memory retrieval”, are involved during insightful problem-solving (Mastria et al. 2018, 13). One

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thing they emphasize is that there are specific stages that our thinking goes through to reach insight. I am going to quote these stages in detail because this understanding is pivotal to why we do the things we do awaiting insight, things that appear to be time wasting but are in fact necessary to give our brain time to process our ideas and thoughts (including not to restate the obvious but again to use one of my favorite terms from the psychology research, those “tasks extraneous to the process”—like cleaning!) Even if insightful solutions occur suddenly and abruptly, EEG studies indicated that insight is not the product of a sudden process … Specifically, four phases in insightful convergent thinking have been identified, each characterized by different brain correlates. The first element of insight emerging from the analysis is the mental impasse … This activity has been explained in terms of an excessive attentive focus on inappropriate problem representations. In insight-like problems, the internal attentional demand is highly charged by unsuccessful solutions that must be stored in working memory (in order to avoid their repetition over time). Because working memory is limited, attention serves as a gatekeeper that, however, could potentially cause a mental impasse, because of an overload … The second phase characterizing insight is a deeper understanding, which helps in identifying the correct solutions. The following phase in the process requires a restructuring of the problem. This phase has been associated with an alpha band activity in the right prefrontal region. The prefrontal cortex is also highly associated with the planning of open-ended problems, and therefore the conscious restructuring of a problem. The final phase of the insight process is the suddenness of the solution … This activity, which appears immediately before the solution response, has been associated with the conscious retrieval of the correct solutions from memory. (Mastria et al. 2018, 14)

Phew! But how could anyone say this better? Most importantly Mastria and her colleagues’ overview of the research reminds us that while insight may seem to appear suddenly, it is a process. During the stage of the creative process where we are sorting through all that information we have stored in our brain or that new information we are garnering via research and experience to enrich what is stored in our brain, we are working toward insight. But this scientific explanation of the workings of the brain during this stage of the creative process still does not bring us to understand how we know which the correct insight is to go with. Again, I am going to

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consider a little bit more research from cognitive psychology neuroscience to help us understand what is happening as we think, before we apply this knowledge to our screenwriting process. Mastria and her colleagues again come to the fore with their overview of the key research in the area. While they do not include this research as part of their overview of insight— rather, it is part of their overview of evaluation of ideas during the ideas’ generation phase—I think it is perhaps the most important way we know what idea we want to work on, in effect what insight is. They note in the process of creative thought during an fMRI study, “creative evaluation was related to the coupling activity of default and executive brain areas, as well as limbic regions, reflecting top-down and affective information processing” (Mastria et al. 2018, 10). What Mastria and her colleagues do not go on to explore here is the place the limbic region plays in what they call “affective” information processing. Essentially, decisions made using affect and emotion derived from the limbic region of the brain, which is proposed to be the center of our emotions, the flight or fight emotions, dating back to caveman times and the threat of predators (Queensland Brain Institute 2023, np). But as screenwriters it is this feeling, this affect, that connects us with what we want to write and how we want our work to impact our audience. The acclaimed Irish screenwriter, Jim Sheridan, writer of the powerful and moving films, My Left Foot (1989) and In the Name of the Father (1993), sums the notion of this “affect” up beautifully as an “emotional charge”: To create a story that the audience will accept it needs an emotional charge. That charge comes from the writer talking about a subject that means something to him. Most writers want something they have not got … They often extract that emotion through writing. Great writing is usually when a writer discovers a moment of change in himself and then finds the vehicle through which he can dramatize that change. (Jim Sheridan in McGrath and MacDermott 2003, 57)

Insight: The Dramatic Center and Truth That seemingly intuitive or visceral (in the guts) feeling associated with insight is probably one of the most unquantifiable drivers of the creative process during screenwriting. Given the many ideas generated by the processes of creativity, how do beginning writers know which idea is the one they want to work on? A lot seems to hang on just knowing that the idea

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or feeling afforded us by insight is what we know or want to write about. If we don’t hold onto this feeling, we can often feel lost or get railroaded by other people’s ideas. It is, as David Lynch said, our “Rosetta Stone”. Screenwriting gurus variously translate this feeling into what is known as the dramatic center, the character spine, the one liner, the concept or a feeling or tone. For example, Steven Zaillian (Schinder’s List, 1993) says, “The first thing I get hooked on is a feeling or a tone, sometimes an idea” (Zaillian in McGrath and MacDermott 2003, 40). The best way I have found to conceive of or describe this feeling  or tone which usually informs the message encapsulated in the one-liner used to pitch a screenplay,  is in the work of one of the screenwriting gurus, Dona Cooper. Cooper’s visceral notion of the dramatic center is a really helpful indicator of knowing what insight is. “Once of the ways I know I’ve found the real dramatic centre of my idea is that I feel a visceral click, a compelling mix of relief, clarity, certainty, and excitement” (Cooper 1997, 41). Cooper notes the power of the dramatic center as pivotal for clarity to channel insight from inspirations: Clarity on my dramatic center also helped me understand exactly what questions I wanted the audience to be thinking about as they watched … Once I knew the epicenter of the idea, I had both the inspiration and the clarity to make exciting and unified choices. (Cooper 1997, 41)

In my writing workshops as a Creativity Coach, I share with my students the many ways people like Cooper and Zaillian conceive insight. A really powerful quote that always resonates to find the emotion that helps us distill insight is from Andrew Stanton, the writer of A Bugs’s Life (1998) and Toy Story (1995), who says, When I write, I am looking for that moment which contains such emotional resonance that it will carry the whole picture. This moment must be universally gettable. It must make you care so much that you will want to sit through the rest of the movie to see what happens. (In McGrath and MacDermott 2003, 114)

I find it helpful to think about that central idea, tone, theme, or feeling of your script, which is distilled from or provides insight, Stanton’s idea of being  a “universally gettable” moment, as a universal truth about life.

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Something we can all understand, relate to, or learn from. The notion of seeking a truth about life that you want to share, in the words of Piesiewicz, “is the small heroism of the artist” (Piesiewicz in McGrath and MacDermott 2003, 137). The person who most beautifully expresses this for me—something I have written about in my chapter in The Handbook of Script Development, when I discuss how stories can travel across borders, to use a film and screenwriting theory term, to be “transnational” (McVeigh 2023, np)—is the great Macedonian writer/director Milcho Manchevski. To crystalize the notion of truth with my screenwriting students I consider the work of Manchevski in his extended essay, Truth and Fiction: Notes on (Exceptional) Faith in Art. Manchevski conceives of truth in storytelling thus: Every piece of art has to contain the truth. But not the truth of what happened. It needs to contain the truth of how things are—and the difference between what happened and how things are is what is important. Is it the events (and by extension the facts) of what happened, or is it the emotional and conceptual underpinning and thus understanding of how things are? (2012, xx)

Manchevski’s thoughts about how screenwriters can create a story that renders an emotional charge an audience will relate to is the gift of great art and writing. It can mean many things to many people, but in order to have this power in your writing you need to experience and know that feeling discovered through the processes of creative thinking and insight, so that what you write has clarity and truth.

Finding the Lightbulb Moment Hand in hand with the ability to use our emotions to guide us in finding and knowing what we want to write about are the craft tools of distilling this emotion via tone and metaphor. Interestingly, there is a significant body of psychology research about how we create metaphor—what psychologist posit is the highest level of analytical thinking. This concept leads us very nicely into the next section where we consider ways to conceptualize our research so that we can know we are on the right track. In screenwriting, this is best encapsulated in the idea of a central metaphor that underlines the themes of the story. It also telescopes the feelings that are created by this metaphor which is also

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beautifully  captured in screenwriting guru Dona Cooper’s idea of the “dramatic centre”, basically the visceral feeling that is evoked by our story as we saw in the previous section. Metaphor is a literary figure of speech where an object is compared to another by speaking as if that object were the other. So many of my favorite films crystalize around the notion of metaphor, which is the emblem of the theme: for example, Argentine writer/director Lucrecia Martel’s use of the fetid pool as the metaphor emblematic of the corruption and lassitude of government and society in La Cienaga (The Swamp); Peruvian writer/director Claudia Llosa’s use of the string of broken pearls as the metaphor for the legacy of rape in war as inflected in the mother’s breast milk in Milk of Sorrow (McVeigh 2018), David E.  Kelly and Jean-Marc Vallee’s use of the female Gothic as the metaphor for the suburban entrapment of the female characters, each with the threat of a hidden secret, in Big Little Lies (McVeigh 2020); and Alena Lodkina’s use of the opal and its iridescence and varied colors as the metaphor for the many reflections of life in the outback in Strange Colours (McVeigh 2023). So, a practical and evidence-based tool for finding the spine or heart of your story is to find a central metaphor to help make truly original and creative work. Nowhere is the importance of metaphor summed up from a screenwriting perspective than by Paul Schrader, writer of Taxi Driver (1976). He says: To be a writer you should first examine and confront your own most pressing personal problems… When you find your problem, then come up with a metaphor for it …A metaphor is something that stands in place of the problem. It is not like the problem. It is another variation of the problem. When this first came to me was with Taxi Driver; the problem was loneliness. The metaphor was the taxicab. That steel, gaudy coffin floating through the sewers of New York… The metaphor of the cab is so powerful that it can be repeated as a metaphor for loneliness... If you look at the great art, whether “Moby Dick” or “Frankenstein”, you get a rock-solid metaphor... Once you know it [the metaphor] you will always know where the story started. This is important because as you write a script, you get very confused with plot and subplot and characters. When you come across a weak scene that is going nowhere, you’ll ask yourself, what is the driving power of this whole story? That is when it is good to know the metaphor. (Schrader in McGrath and MacDermott 2003, 14)

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There are reasons why the powerful metaphor of the loner and outcast Travis Bickle looking out from his taxicab works. And they can be found in psychology research. One reason is that basically our brain at the inspiration and research stages, as we have learnt, is searching for a way to categorize information. The second reason it that the creation of “Metaphor provides a means of expressing emotion-based associations for creative problem solving” (Lubart and Getz 1997, 286) Another reason is telescoped by Thomas Ward in his research on metaphor and analogy in cognitive psychology. Ward’s observations serve to remind us that analogy (here we can read metaphor) is a sort of convergence approach in reverse and “is a global descriptor for more fundamental processes such as alignment, retrieval, mapping, and projection of information from a source to a target domain” (Ward 2007, 36). Ward also suggests that there is research about analogy that needs to be further considered so this is an emerging field. This I think is important for us to remember as we think from the inside out. No one has all the answers but there are some things we do know including that “creativity relevant processing topics such as the role of memory and forgetting in incubation and insight, intuition, the importance of problem solving and problem definition” as well as “reasoning about unexpected findings” are all part of the process (Ward 2007, 36). In his fascinating article, “Dissociable neural systems for analogy and metaphor: Implications for the neuroscience of creativity”, neuroscientist Oshin Vartanian discusses current models of analogy and metaphor as conceptualized in neuroscientific research, mapping the functioning of the brain taken by the MRI. He reminds us that there is a lot of work going on in the brain in developing analogy and metaphor through the processes of what neuroscientists call “structural alignment”. The thinking processes behind creating “analogy can be conceived of as a structural alignment between mental representations to find the maximal structural consistency between them” (Vartanian 2012, 304). The discrete elements of these thinking processes are: (1) retrieval of relevant content from long-term memory based on current content in working memory (WM); (2) mapping (i.e., aligning) the representational content of cases in WM and projecting inferences from one case to another; (3) evaluating the analogy (inferences and projections); (4) abstracting the structure common to both analogs, and, in some cases (5) re-representing, which involves adapting the representations to improve fit. (Vartanian 2012, 304)

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This makes sense. But let’s think about these processes more carefully and what we can do at each stage to make sure we make unique and beautiful metaphors to enliven our writing and make it original. And how of course we can use the research stage to facilitate this. We need to find ideas or images from long-term memory. Tick the box there by living a rich life and drawing on what you know, including, for example, those family stories or what makes you unique. Mapping. Well at the research stage you are guided by insight, so you can map and connect the dots between different ideas and images by, for example, association and convergent thinking. Evaluating. You have the tools here. Your decisions are guided by the essentials of screenwriting—the dramatic center, the tone or feeling, the genre elements you want to explore. Abstracting. This is the harder part, which parts have become most important? They rise to the surface. Like Paul Schrader found in Taxi Driver. The essential problem was loneliness. Go to the next stage here. Re-represent this. This is what Schrader did with the taxicab. What Martel did with The Swamp. What David E. Kelly did with Big Little Lies. So, making metaphor is a process, and we can work through it. Great. On the other hand, of interest to us as we search for that metaphor— our taxi driver—that will mark our work as really creative—Vartanian notes that “Metaphors can serve as vehicles for contemplating concepts at higher levels of abstraction … historically metaphors have been viewed as important in creativity” (Vartanian 2012, 305). In essence, neuroscientific research has shone a light on the power of metaphor over analogy—saying something is something else via metaphor rather than something is like something else via analogy. Vartanian notes that, like analogy, metaphor is “based on structure mapping” but that there are differences. He posits that these are as follows: First, there are more structural variants and ‘blends’ of metaphor than analogy. Second, metaphor is more frequently used to make novel and vivid comparisons than analogy. Third, whereas analogy typically serves an explanatory-predictive purpose, metaphor is more likely to serve an affective-­ expressive purpose. To the extent that these differences engage their corresponding neural systems, the neural systems for analogy and metaphor should be dissociable. (Vartanian 2012, 306)

While the hypothesis of Vartanian’s article is to try to prove that the neural systems for analogy and metaphor can be dissociated—in fact, he

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does not prove this—but he does investigate the workings of the mind as we search for analogy and metaphor to show us how we are thinking at this stage of writing. More importantly, he proved that metaphor for us as screenwriters is a powerful tool. Metaphor is the tool that we can use as writers to really move our audiences. It is the tool to use for affect! Again, let us remember that thinking during the creative process is not a simple chronological and logical step-by-step process where we can only think in analogy and metaphor during the research phase. That is not true, as we can find metaphor at any stage, just as we can gain insight. However, as we are thinking through  all the stages  of the creative process in this book, I have discussed how we can think about creating metaphor at the research and insight stage, as for me this is beautifully distilled via the dramatic center or other affective tools like tone. So, what does all this mean for us? Basically, to make new work, to make something new and original in our domain, we need to do work. New research to fill that working memory so that there is matter there to work on. Old research formed from living a rich life so that again there is matter there to work on in long-term memory. Relax and stay loose so that the processes of abstraction can occur—so that inhibitions are lowered but at the same time be focused and goal directed so that we are actively working to find that metaphor, whether consciously or unconsciously. I explore the idea of relaxing, staying loose, letting inhibitions and barriers down in the next chapter as again, while mediation and mindfulness are important at any stage of the creative process, they probably are most important when we are actually writing, so I will leave this discussion to our exploration of Writing and Flow. Before this, however, I want to talk more about how we can fill our working memory with research as Shindo proposes below: Many of the films made by Hollywood and in Britain, France, and Russia, are like masters that teach me. What is important is to incorporate the essence of those great masters into my own work without merely imitating them. Nobody comes out of the womb as a screenwriter. It takes great effort to develop such talent. There are skills to learn, but it is not something you go to school and learn. You have to be a talented artist, you have to learn about people, about cinematic technique and about writing, and unless your ability to understand cinematic technique matches your ability to write, it will not work out. (Shindo 2003, 99)

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Research, of course for it to be truly worthwhile, means you have to have some idea of what it is you are searching for. The exercises in the “What If?” section of this chapter are designed to help you crystalize and lead you to insight during the research and insight phase of the creative process. Have a go!

What If? 1. Treasured Item from Childhood (Finding the Theme, the Emotion) This is a beautiful exercise for crystalizing core themes, feelings, and tones that are important to you as a writer. These may be themes or ideas or feelings that you do to even know are important. I first came across this exercise when I went to a  Creativity Workshop in New  York as a reward to myself for completing my PhD. We were asked to bring along to the workshop “a treasured item from childhood”. I thought I would delve into my music box of hidden childhood treasures and take the spinning ballerina doll as she was always something beautiful I liked to look at when I played my music box as a child. However, when I opened my music box, it was not the ballerina that called out to me to be selected but an ivory brooch that my grandmother always wore pinned to her lapel. When I talked about this brooch some weeks later in the workshop, I was moved to think about how important my grandmother had been in my life as a strong role model who was independent and loving and always saw the joy in life. The brooch was a powerful metaphor for what I find important in my writing and research. Likewise, when I do this exercise with my students, so much is revealed about what is important to them based on the choice of item they bring to class to discuss. A warning here. This is an emotional exercise. Some of my students have shared really powerful insights. Like my student, who brought her teddy bear as this was the item she always took with her to school as she was bullied, and the bear gave her comfort. Or so many of my students who bring reminders of beach holidays—like photos or shells—as reminders of happy times with their family. A really insightful use of this exercise was highlighted once when one of my students said that he had no treasured item from childhood to bring as he had thrown everything from childhood out. On the day when he shared his lack of item, the dramatic center of his storytelling became obvious—he had turned his back on

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who he was in childhood to become a different person. To conclude this exercise, here is what one of my students said: Using an object so close to me emotionally helped me imagine and understand better—the degree of emotional attachment my character could feel towards a treasured item of his. Automatic writing, gathering ideas and the co-ordination between the Right Brain/Left Brain are some of the extremely important tools that I was never aware of. Applying these and witnessing the creative possibilities—equally exciting. (McVeigh 2016)

2. Myth and the Family Story The family is a great crucible for drama, and it is a microcosm for all that may happen in society. Great Latin American films are testament to this, where the family is a metaphor for the state, like in Lucrecia Martel’s The Swamp. Think also about why all the Greek myths are about family relationships. My first feature film was about a dark family story. Think about events that impacted you as part of your family when growing up or a family story that has been handed down for generations. Think about what you learnt from this family drama and the types of subjects and themes that this has made you want to explore as a result. As you think, try to make the images concrete by bringing to mind the physical details of the scene including the light, the sounds, the colors, the shapes and textures, as well as the emotional tone. Develop a feeling for the world you are immersing yourself in. See if you can find people you remember there. Just let images and people and ideas slowly appear, and begin to explore them as possible images for your story. Try to stay away from plot to start. Just let the people, places, and potential themes or ideas emerge from your long-term memory. Research ancient Greek myths and legends and use themes or scenarios  from these as templates for finding  your dramatic center  or central metaphor. For example, the myth of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun as he did not listen to his father, Daedalus, as they attempted to escape from Minos, who had imprisoned them. Or Oedipus and his relationship with his mother. Alternatively, take the story patterns and learning from fairy stories, like those from Grimm’s fairy tales, which import truths about life. Hansel and Gretel, about being aware of doing what you are told so as to avoid danger. Rapunzel about the longing of a girl who is imprisoned and kept away from her lover. Beauty and the Beast about finding true love when it’s not looks that count.

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3. Sorting Through This exercise is beautiful outlined by Australian novelist Kate Grenville in her book about writing, The Writing Book: A Workbook for Fiction Writers. (1990, 18–19). Go back to the writing you wrote in the Inspiration and Envisioning chapter. You will see that you have a seemingly random collection of writing excerpts. Bits of dreams, memories, stream of consciousness imaginings, and writing from mind maps. Have a look at these excerpts. It is the raw material for stories based on what is on your mind or what your mind would like to explore. See if there are any common themes or categories—paragraphs that speak. Group them. The grouping or connections can be any way you choose. Things like boring bits or exciting bits. Genre inspirations or characters you  would like to know more about. Places you would like to go. You choose. You can literally print out the pages and cut them up if you have been writing on a computer or cut them up if they are in a journal. Before you cut them up, you may like to photocopy just to have a backup, but it is up to you. You can paste the ideas onto index cards that you can shuffle,  spread out, and rearrange. As Grenville advises, you are letting your mind direct you to where it wants to go rather than forcing material to fit a preconceived idea. She tellingly hits the nail on the head when she says, “In all these improvisations, you were free to write about anything at all. That means that what you ended up writing about was probably something that matters to you. What it is, and why it matters, is still buried deeply in those pieces but the process of looking for connections is the first step in uncovering it. The fragments mightn’t seem to relate to each other at all, at first glance, but they already have several things in common. Firstly, they were all written by the same person—they all came out of your mind, and your mind alone. Secondly, they were probably written within a fairly short space of time so it’s likely that similar ideas or moods will be in several of them” (1990, 19).

References Cooper, Dona. 1997. Writing Great Screenplays for Film and TV. New York: Arco. Macmillan. Coppola, Francis Ford. 2019. Masterclass, Il Ritrovato Film Festival, Bologna @ https://festival.ilcinemaritrovato.it/coppola-­sapete-­qual-­e-­il-­segreto-­r ubare-­ dai-­migliori/.

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Grenville, Kate. 1990. The Writing Book: A Workbook for Fiction Writers. Sydney, Australia: Allen and Unwin Pty Ltd. Kaufman, Scott Barry, and Carolyn Gregoire. 2016. Wired to Create. NY: TarcherPerigee, Imprint of Penguin Random House. Lubart, Todd, and Getz, Isaac. 1997. Emotion, metaphor and the creative process. Creativity Research Journal 10 (4), 285–301. https://doi.org/10.1207/ s15326934crj1004_1 Lynch, David. 2007. Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity. New York: Penguin. Manchevski, Milcho. 2012. Truth and Fiction: Notes on (Exceptional) Faith in Art. Punctum Books. Mastria, Serena, Sergio Agnoli, Marco Zanon, Todd Lubart, and Giovanni Emanuele Corazza. 2018. Creative Brain, Creative Mind, Creative Person. In Exploring Transdisciplinarity in Art and Sciences, ed. Zoe Kapoula et  al. Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-­3-­319-­76054-­4_1. McVeigh, M. 2016. Finding the Lightbulb Moment: Creativity & Inspiration in the Teaching of the Craft of Screenwriting. ASPERA. http://aspera.org.au/ research/. ———. 2018. Different But the Same: Landscape and the Gothic as Transnational Story Space in Jane Campion’s Sweetie (1989) and Lucrecia Martel’s La Ciénaga (2001). In Critical Arts: North- North Cultural and Media Studies. Volume 31, 2017—Issue 5: Cinema at the End of the World. Taylor & Francis. ———. 2020. Telling Big Little Lies: Screenwriting and the Creation of the Female Gothic as Extended Metaphor in Complex Television. The Journal of Screenwriting 11 (1, April) (Intellect). ———. 2023. Script Development from the Inside Looking Out. Telling a Transnational Story in the Australian films, 33 Postcards (Chan, 2011) and Strange Colors (Lodkina, 2017). In R. Russo, C. Tieber, and R. Davies (Eds.), Palgrave Handbook of Screenwriting Research. Palgrave Macmillan. (In press). Mikkelsen, Thea. 2020. Coaching the Creative Impulse: Psychological Dynamics and Professional Creativity. Taylor and Francis Group. Piesiewicz, Krzysztof. 2003. In Screencraft: Screenwriting, ed. Declan McGrath and Felim MacDermott, 126–138. Switzerland: Rotovision. Queensland Brain Institute. 2023. The Limbic System. Accessed May 2, 2023. @ https://qbi.uq.edu.au/brain/brain-­anatomy/limbic-­system. Redvall, Eva Novrup. 2008. Scriptwriting as a Creative, Collaborative Learning Process of Problem Finding and Problem Solving. MedieKultur: Journal of Media and Communication Research 25 (46): 34–55. Schrader, Paul. 2003. In Screencraft Screenwriting, ed. Declan McGrath and Felim MacDermott, 12–24. Rotovision.

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Sheridan, Jim. 2003. In Screencraft Screenwriting, ed. Declan McGrath and Felim Mac Dermott, 52–64. Rotovision. Shindo, Kaneto 2003. In Screencraft Screenwriting, ed. Declan McGrath and Felim MacDermott, 90–100. Rotovision. Stanton, Andrew. 2003. In Screencraft Screenwriting, ed. Declan McGrath and Felim Mac Dermott, 112–126. Rotovision. Vartanian, Oshin. 2012. Dissociable Neural Systems for Analogy and Metaphor: Implications for the Neuroscience of Creativity. British Journal of Psychology 103: 302–316. Ward, Thomas. 2007. Creative Cognition as a Window on Creativity. Methods 42: 28–37. Zaillian, Steven. 2003. In Screencraft Screenwriting. ed. Declan McGrath and Felim MacDermott. 38–52. Rotovision.

CHAPTER 7

Writing and Flow. Just do it!

Abstract  This chapter focuses on the writing of the first draft of a screenplay. It considers the hard “work” of screenwriting—the importance of actioning the research, putting craft into practice, and working like an industry screenwriter with routines and processes. It underlines the key factors that denote success in this stage of the screenwriting process, both personal and practical. Findings from cognitive psychology and neuroscience regarding the creative personality and the importance of factors like grit and determination and the place that emotion plays in the creative process are underlined by quotes from writers involved in case studies in screenwriting. The chapter applies laboratory-based research into how mindfulness and meditation can be deployed as a means of understanding how writers use the unconscious and access “flow” to be totally immersed in their writing. The work of the chapter is encapsulated under the framework heading “Work in Progress” which crystallizes the relevant stage of thinking and writing like a creative. The “Creative Process Stage” explores key creativity theory and the “Craft Stage” backgrounds key screenwriting theory. The “What If?” section of the chapter is a concluding coda of three

Work in Progress Creative Process Stage: Writing and Flow Craft Stage: Synopsis, Outline, Treatment, Rough First Draft © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. McVeigh, Screenwriting from the Inside Out, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40520-4_7

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activities for thinking and writing like a creative, drawn from the ideas developed in the chapter. Keywords  Screenwriting • Creativity • Creative process • Immersion • Flow The idea is the whole thing. If you stay true to the idea, it tells you everything you need to know, really. You just keep working to make it look like that idea looked, feel like it felt, sound like it sounded, and be the way it was. (Lynch 2007, 83)

Putting Words on the Page Your desk is super tidy. Your research files are all lined up. Your characters are inhabited. But unless you “just do it” they will go nowhere. This stage is probably the scariest part of screenwriting as there is no excuse now to avoid writing. You have been inspired by what you know—your truth or reality—or what you know you want to find out about. You have done all the research and preparation and tolerated great ambiguities. You have found insight and perhaps even metaphor. Now is the time to put the research and preparation into action. This is an individual thing really. And I must really stress there is no right or wrong way to start writing the first draft of your screenplay. Some people like to have their carefully planned map of what will happen by their side so that they can follow the plan religiously. Some people like to have done all the research and just put it away in a literal or figurative drawer and write a rough first draft from stop to start. Some will have started writing stream of consciousness before any apparent stage of the creative process. Some will have been dipping in and out of stages and have been writing scraps of, or entire scenes as they come to them, then they may circle back to the previous stages we have discussed in this book. All these ways of just “doing it” are legit. You must do what works for you. But the most important thing is to start. We can procrastinate and procrastinate but until we put pen to paper or finger to keyboard our story will not happen. The screenplay cannot write itself.

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The ways that screenwriters start and keep writing is many and varied. Let’s see how some of the great writers McGrath and McDermott interviewed in Screencraft Screenwriting start just doing it! The Polish screenwriter, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, who collaborated with his friend the great Polish filmmaker, Krzysztof Kieslowski (think the Three Colours Trilogy) in the development of his films, says he just starts with the first scene and lets the story unfold and tell itself. But do note he thinks about what he wants to say, and he is aware how the story will end. In my scripts there is always a subject I want to discuss with the viewer. I start by asking myself whether this subject is significant, and whether I have anything to say about it. The actual subjects or themes arise from my own introspection. Once I have my subject or theme, I start and write the first scene while being aware of what I shall say in the last scene. (Piesiewicz 2003, 131)

For David Lynch, a film comes in fragments. He starts with as we have discussed, his eureka moment, what he calls his Rosetta Stone, which unlocks the puzzle of what the film will be. He says, That first fragment is like the Rosetta Stone. It’s the piece of the puzzle that indicates the rest. It’s a hopeful puzzle piece. … You fall in love with the first idea, that tiny piece. And once you’ve got it, the rest will come in time. (Lynch 2007, 23)

We have previously talked about how he started with the phrase “Dick Laurent is Dead” as the impetus for Lost Highway. For his famous surrealist film, Blue Velvet, the first fragments were random images and a song. In Blue Velvet, it was red lips, green lawns, and the song—Bobby Vinton’s version of “Blue Velvet”. The next thing was an ear lying in a field. And that was it. (Lynch 2007, 23)

For other screenwriters it is all about the structure. But writing at the behest of structure, which may appear a little formulaic depending on how you use structure, does not mean that a story is unoriginal. The great Irish screenwriter Jim Sheridan likes to structure but he does underline his thoughts about the importance of structure by saying it must go hand in hand with creativity.

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For all I have said about structure, it is ultimately worthless without creativity. The three-act structure is the Big Mac of the movie world. The writer with the passion to tell a story is what I admire. (Sheridan 2003, 63)

Whatever way you like to start, I reiterate, just do it and go with the process that works for you. Along the way let’s have a look at the research that will help us during this phase of writing intensely, what the great creativity psychology researcher Csikszentmihalyi made famous with the word “flow”. I am sure you all know what flow feels like. It is like catching a giant wave and going for the ride—it seems liberating and effortless but in fact it takes a lot of hard work and talent to get to this stage, as Jim Sheridan reminds us: Writing is hard. You are abandoning your life, mentally and physically abstracting yourself outside of reality … But when you really get into writing it becomes a meditation where you find a moment of stillness, or even change, within yourself. (Sheridan 2003, 63)

As a Creativity Coach I discuss inspirational quotes like those above with my students so that they can be reassured that writing is a process of craft and creativity, but also that it is not a set process. It is also of course learning from the Masters! It is important that writers find what works for them and just go with the flow.

Finding Flow Let’s see what the screenwriting research says about this very important stage of the creative process—Writing and Flow—the stage where the work we wish to create has its first draft. In screenwriting it is a very rule-­ bound object governed by screenplay format and the industry requirements of the screenplay including the synopsis and the first draft. There is also an intermediate stage of the treatment, which is a prose-based working document that many writers choose to use, or others may use the beat sheet or the scene breakdown. For the purposes of this chapter, we will consider whether or not you write these working documents, as just doing it in some way! There is quite a bit of research about working through the making or doing stage of immersion and flow during the process of creating any work of art or any artistic object including all forms like painting, music and writing.

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In the screenwriting sphere, as we said earlier, the most insightful work combining the rigor of data analysis from the psychology laboratory and the more usual mode of interview in screenwriting is Samira Bourgeois-­ Bougrine and her colleagues’ 2014 article, “The Creativity Maze”. In this article these researchers interviewed screenwriters about what they did during the period of flow. Significantly, they found that “Intuition, instinct, or unconscious processes lead to a new development that was not planned in advance and is somehow beyond the scriptwriter’s will, as described in a ‘flow’ state experienceby (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996)” (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 393). There were some interesting ways of getting into flow reported that seem to tap into our intuition and unconscious processes that I am sure are familiar to you. In Bourgeois-Bougrine and her colleagues’ research some screenwriters mentioned their need to listen to music or to have background noise, which they believed helped them to be creative while writing: I listen to music, radio … I have always something in my ears when I write. It is like a state of trance. (N5) (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 389) I go to coffee shops because there is a soundscape that helps me to be “absent of myself,” distant from the person I am all the time … Being outside, in other circumstances, and with a sort of back-ground noise gives me greater freedom for objects to “circulate” in my head and around me. I feel that the connections are not similar (when working at home). (S3) (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 389) If I work in conditions where a whole part of myself is forced to fight against the outside, against noise for example, the surplus of power that I deploy to resist allows me to concentrate better. I am fiercer with my own object, more active … more powerful in what I am going to tell, avoiding coquetry or things that would just be pleasing to me. (D16) (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 389)

In their discussion of the findings from “The Creativity Maze” research, Bourgeois-Bougrine and her colleagues cite the work of other researchers to explain the effectiveness of background noise (e.g., writing in a café) to help us stay in flow (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 398). They suggest this could be explained by the “deliberation- without-attention” effect of unconscious thoughts and distractions, rather than conscious deliberation

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mediated and facilitated, “problem solving and decision making”, quoting research that “showed that participants who were distracted with easier tasks (listening to music and word search puzzles) made the best decision significantly more often than conscious thinkers, and even outperformed participants distracted with more difficult tasks” (Bourgeois-Bougrine et  al. 2014, 398). They also noted other research that suggested that “moderate (70 dB) background ambient noise reflecting consumption contexts (e.g., a combination of multi-talker noise in a cafeteria, roadside traffic, and distant construction noise) induced processing difficulty, which activates abstract cognition and consequently enhances creative performance” (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 398).

Being in the Zone While to talk about finding flow sounds easy—just like turning on a tap to use that water metaphor again—there is a lot going on as Kaufman and Gregoire illuminate for us in their great book, Wired to Create (2016). They provide an elegant summary in layman’s language of what the large brain networks, including the imagination network (what they call the default mode network) and the executive control network are doing during flow. Creative thought doesn’t emerge solely from the imagination network. A different brain network—the ‘executive attention’ network, which helps us direct our attention … Executive control processes support creative thinking by helping us deliberately plan future actions, remember to use various creative tactics, keep track of which strategies we’ve already tried, and reject the most obvious ideas. They also help us focus [sic] our imagination, blocking out external distractions and allowing us to tune into our inner experience. (Kaufman and Gregoire 2016, xxviii–xxix)

Kaufman and Gregoire go on to liken all this work the brain is doing during flow to a dance, a cognitive tango: When we generate new ideas, these networks—along with the salience network, which is responsible for motivation—engage in an intricate dance. Researchers have observed this cognitive tango in action through the brain scans of people engaged in their personal creative process … Initially … brain states resemble a state of flow, or complete absorption in the task. The

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imagination and salience networks are highly active, while the more focused executive attention network is relatively quiet. As they further hone and refine their work or engage in collaboration with others, however, the executive attention network becomes increasingly more active. (Kaufman and Gregoire 2016, xxix)

Kaufman and Gregoire talk about the decisions the brain networks are making as we churn out those words, be it a set target of say 500 words that are number crunched each day, or endless words that seem to flow onto the page. Again, there is no correct way to pump out those words and indeed, if you think you have perfected a way that works for you, you may find that it only works in certain situations or for certain types of stories. Basically, whether writing is your hobby or your job, it requires focus and mindset. Just like any job it is important to set up the good habits that support this job. Robert Towne (Chinatown 1974; The Firm 1993) sees writing as hard work. His comments about his “fisherman” mindset echo David Lynch’s idea that in searching for ideas in your writing you are setting out to work like a fisherman—catching what Lynch calls “the big fish”! I think my own writing habits come from working as a fisherman earlier in my life. I write every day until I drop and keep writing until it is finished. A fisherman is out every day until sunset. Every time, he throws his pole in the water kit is an act of faith, hoping there is something down there beneath that grey expanse of water. There were fish yesterday, and so he figures he’ll catch some today. You are not doing anything terribly different as a writer. You think there is something underneath that grey matter, and you have to go fish it out. (Towne in McGrath and MacDermott 2003, 151)

Staying in the Zone Let’s unpack what the job of being a writer is as you are in the zone and writing that screenplay. While there are a number of great books about the day-to-day life of a writer including Being A Writer by Stephen King and The Mystery of the Cleaning Lady by Sue Woolfe, and there are endless screenwriting guru books that give a formula or excellent advice about how to write a screenplay. Again however it is the work of Samira Bourgeois-Bougrine and her colleagues in “The Creativity Maze” that

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gives us collated data about what screenwriters are doing during the Writing and Flow phase of the Creative Process. In “The Creativity Maze”, Bourgeois-Bougrine and her colleagues proposed a three-phase—phases A, B, and C—model of the creative process during screenwriting and investigated impressive detail about what the screenwriters reported was happening at each stage. Basically, their Phase B encapsulates the main elements that are going on in the mind during the immersion phase of Writing and Flow. This encompasses a variety of approaches from just getting words onto the page without the inhibitions of planning or structure to carefully plotting and structuring and writing the story beat by beat. Most importantly, however, they found that to make creativity happen you have to show up and do the work. One of the screenwriters they interviewed underlined this thus: I’d say you must search, search, and again search; nothing comes without effort. Nothing is ever given to you. And this is also why regular daily work is required. There are days when nothing happens, and this is normal, so you should not blame yourself. And there are other days when things happen … and this is because for three days you have searched without finding anything. (S3) (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 393)

Their findings also remind us that while we discuss the stages of the creative process as discrete elements, they are nonetheless interwoven. Inspiration and research do not stop when we start writing. Bourgeois-­ Bougrine and her colleagues found that for 86% of the participants in their research project, the cycle of writing new ideas, evaluating choices, and making changes is ongoing during the Writing and Flow stage of the creative process, whether or not you are working to a plan or structure. What they found basically boils down to the fact that again you have to have discipline and do the hard yards of showing up to write. Treat it like a job, as insight and creativity just won’t happen automatically. One screenwriter said, It is necessary to be detached from any idea that could be close to “inspiration,” from all those fantasies you read about writers with their little notebooks where they would take a note of a sudden brilliant idea… If I were to write only when I am in the mood of writing, I would not go far. (N5) (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 393)

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To Structure or Not to Structure: That Is the Question In the stage of Writing and Flow, screenwriters are writing the industry standard documents that they are required to deliver to collaborators like directors or funding bodies. In this phase, wherein the architecture of a story is actualized in the final output, the first draft (usually called the rough first draft) of approximately 90 pages of story is written in the very specific 10-point times new roman font format of the screenplay, where roughly one page of script equals one minute of screen time. No matter how you get to it in your writing, most likely your work will have some kind of recognizable structure—be it something governed by the recognizable patterns of The Three Act Structure, The Rising Three Act Structure, The Hero’s Journey, The Heroine’s Journey, the plot formulas of genre including Noir, Thriller, Romance, Sci-Fi, Horror, or any hybrid of the same. With the traditional rising three act structured narrative on which a Western screenplay is usually based, the audience is conditioned to wait for certain familiar beats or turning points that indicate where the narrative is going. However, all structures are an envelope for a story where a main character or characters go on some sort of journey or quest in which they meet obstacles that create conflict. In Aristotle’s terms drama—character in action—is character in conflict. That is not to say there are no other story structures and I really counsel you to explore these. The great film theorist David Bordwell writes about the story patterns of what is basically avant-­ garde or art house film with a structure he calls parametric narration in his 1985 book Narration and The Fiction Film. I really like to use his ideas with my students to push the boundaries of narrative form or plot structure. Essentially, Bordwell identifies three major proponents of avant-­ garde narration—which in its strict sense is the plot—the way one action follows another in the chronological time of the story we view on the screen. Not the story that may be told in other ways including flashback and flashforward for example. Getting back to parametric narration, according to Bordwell it includes a character in a boundary situation (usually the crisis), and we spiral out from there with patterns and repetitions. Think the famous avant-garde film Meshes of the Afternoon. Likewise, we can identify other narrative patterns from other non-Western cultures that give us different and real and unusual ways (part of the very essence of creativity) of patterning our story. Think the melodrama and repetition of

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the Mexican telenovela. The circular structure of Persian storytelling. The thousand and –one nights’ structure of work like Jocelyne Saab’s Dunia. The complex narrative structure of Iñárritu’s Amores Perros. There are so many narrative structures you can emulate to make your story complex and unique beyond the hero’s journey. But let’s get back to flow and the fact that you are in the zone writing and you have either worked out a rough structure you are going to follow, or you are going to just get it all down and then work out the structure. Whatever works best for you! Bottom line is though if you want to be a writer and pitch your story to other people, you are going to have to talk the talk of industry and deliver the working documents they need—most likely in this order—the synopsis (a condensed usually circa 100 words’ version of the plot in chronological order if not giving away, nearly giving away the ending); an outline (a list of scenes and sequences), and a treatment (the elaborated prose version of the outline, 20 to 40 pages present-tense version of the story where you can put in as many adjectives and adverbs and “they are thinkings” as you like, things that are big no no’s in the actual script that is a highly visual form of writing and driven by the maxim “show don’t tell”). Alternatively, you may just be in the position where you deliver the script itself. Whatever document it may be, the creativity theory still applies for you to think about and use as best suits you. In screenwriting courses when I was learning my craft, we were often required to write a synopsis so that others could see what we wanted to write about and give us a green light to proceed and then we worked through the other documents in the set order. In Bourgeois-Bougrine and her colleagues’ study, the writers interviewed were at polar ends of the scale concerning how helpful they found using or creating, these industry-­ specific documents was to their creative process. This polarity is elegantly summed up by one of the scriptwriters interviewed during the research: It is as if you are starting a walk. There are two schools: you either go on an adventure and let yourself be guided by the path, or you carefully study the maps, weather forecast, possible pitfalls, and so forth. Either way you can have a very nice walk. (N13) (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 392)

Overall, most of the screenwriters Bourgeois-Bougrine and her colleagues interviewed detested the idea of writing a synopsis before the screenplay had been written. I agree as so often writers believe that they have to get the synopsis right at the beginning when they have not yet

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written the screenplay. So, the takeaway for us is don’t stress here. If you find this hard you are not alone! Here is what they said. It seems very artificial; it forces us to develop a story with characters we do not yet know … we have to pretend … I hate it. (S2) (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 391)

They also found there were glaring differences on whether writers liked to, or needed to write a beat outline or a treatment. Comments illustrating this polarity included one group who declared “that they are against a preconceived plan; for them, the writing of the narrative is not about ‘filling in the gaps’ of the outline” (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 391). Others echoed this statement with observations like: I am not able to follow the official steps: synopsis, treatment, outline and finally script. I can proceed with the details of some scenes while I still do not know yet what will be the end of the film … I do not start from the skeleton and then add muscles, organs and so on. What I have is some organs, some muscles, a head, arms, maybe bones, and when I have all the parts of the body I try to combine them and make them fit together. (D6) (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 392) This is also why I do not like the outlines and treatments: I find them too predictable. Especially now that they are “validated” by the producers, so if you change something, they strike back. (N8) (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 392)

However, Bourgeois-Bougrine and her colleagues’ research did find that most writers did like to have some sort of road map, or diagram or drawings that they keep for their own use and do not share. I feel I should have written a scene to know how to “shape” the next one. It’s the same for my books, I do not have a plan. (N8) (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 392)

However, some rested in the middle of the field acknowledging the importance of having some sort of a roadmap that is a personal document to get a vague idea of the architecture of the story (Bourgeois-Bougrine et  al. 2014, 392). What stood out for this group was that they were

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experienced and the craft processes of writing a standard-length 90-minute feature film were second nature to them. I have the impression of having acquired a certain competency regarding these fundamental questions: how to construct a story, depart from one already written, how to write dialogues that don’t sound too awkward, how to enter a scene and end it without getting lost. (N8) (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 392)

Another validated the effect of experience and practice: Writing is a matter of “breath.” A story of 1 hour 30, it is a bit like an athletic discipline: the more you practice, the more you are comfortable. But I’m useless when I have to write a short film! What’s crazy is that, almost by magic, by experimentation as well, the rhythm of 90 minutes becomes natural. I have great difficulty with other rhythms. (S15) (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 392)

On the other hand, there were those who rigidly adhered to a more formulaic mode of writing their screenplay including for reasons that are obvious if one likes to follow a plan. These included to set the tried-and-­ true elements of a screenplay because “It sets the temporal pattern of the narrative: the plot order, the duration of the story, the rhythm of the story, the shortcuts, acceleration, ellipsis, flashbacks”; “It helps to have an overview of the story, which is one of the major challenges during the writing-­ rewriting phase” and what I find most useful, “It is a useful diagnostic tool; it helps to step back from the manuscript to see what might be wrong in it (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 392). At the far end of the scale were those who literally did not know where they were going, describing the process like entering a jungle! I’m going in all directions, like a hunter who wanders in a forest. (D16) (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 392)

Headlights and Stop Lights Bourgeois-Bougrine and her colleagues (2014, 392) identify the actual stage of writing the screenplay as the production phase. They also include the rewriting phase of screenwriting in this phase, but I am going to include it in Chap. 8—the Shaping and Sharing phase, as it involves

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considerably different aspects of the creative process and the creative personality. For me and for my students writing is about writing. It is being in and out of the zone. You may or may not have written the planning documents. You may or may not be writing in your preferred time or space. But you are writing! In their study, Bourgeois-Bougrine et  al. (2014, 392) found that for some, writing happened very intensively and very quickly whether or not they were using their preferred mode of writing. And suddenly I would say, let’s get started! … I like this frantic process: I get up at 4:30 in the morning, I work all day … it becomes a kind of war plan … I can stay 15 hours completely immersed in my work. (S1) (Bourgeois-­ Bougrine et al. 2014, 392)

Equally they found that writing for others was a stop–start process. Sometimes they were in the zone and sometimes they were not. Sometimes they had plotted and planned sometimes they had not. For example, I start a scene, I try to write dialogues, and then I realize that it is too early. If you do not know where it all goes, you often find that the dialogues are very poor. So, I always work everything at the same time: I write a synopsis and I start a scene … It is very mixed, and frankly it’s a bit of a bloody mess. (N12) (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 392)

Another writer sums up this idea thus: For an original script, I start from a situation, which seems interesting or funny. Then I try to see where it will lead me. In most cases, I don’t know where I am going. Things build up gradually, and the meaning of all this emerges very late and sometimes not at all. (D6) (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 392)

In my teaching I find my students like what we call “the headlight approach”—writing to the idea or image that you can just identify at the edge of the headlights. E. L. Doctorow coined this term when he said that “writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way” (in Lamont 1995, 18). In Bourgeois-Bougrine and her colleagues’ study this idea was echoed by one of the participants who said:

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I start writing the scene, I know roughly where I want to go, even though I do not really know how to get there, and the fact of writing by following the character makes me find it. (D20) (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 392)

What I find really interesting is what the writers whom Bourgeois-­ Bougrine and her colleagues interviewed said about using a knowledge of structure as a diagnostic tool. This is how I like to use structure (but remember this is only me; everyone has their way of working). Bourgeois-­ Bougrine and her colleagues found that some screenwriters found it useful as a sort of structural overlay, an overview of the story that acted as a diagnostic tool they used after they had written the rough first draft. It provided these writers with way of thinking about why a story might be not working at a certain stage (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 392). We can see from Bourgeois-Bougrine’s great study that there is no one-­ size-­fits-all way of writing a script. Bottom line as I say so often, you have to find what works for you. If it works like a charm keep on writing this way. I have had students who happily write great scripts in many ways. Some adhere slavishly to the dictum that this page equals this turning point. Some procrastinate and procrastinate and submit their script one minute before the online deadline (such are the joys of technology that Big Brother can see this). In the final analysis, there is nothing wrong with doing whatever works for you if it gets the job done to deliver a creative, authentic, and engaging script that someone will love to make into a film! Now we know about the creative process stage of Writing and Flow and how the craft decisions like whether to structure or whether to write a treatment are individual decisions and that there is no on “right” way to write a screenplay, let’s look at what the psychology research is telling us about what we are thinking as we write in this stage, and thus how we can write better. The bottom line is as Bourgeois Bougrine and her colleagues’ research reveals is that there are conscious and unconscious processes that must be honored as we get to know and revel in our individual processes: It is the unconscious that talks. You are about to write something and it takes you in an unforeseen direction. (S1) (Bourgeois-Bougrine et  al. 2014, 393) In every story, there is a moment that reminds me of what we feel in an automatic car. There can always be a change of gear decided by the car itself, not your hand or foot. This arrives when the story is on the way. There is a

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sensation of speed and fluency one can recognize when it happens (S3). (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 393)

As Bourgeois-Bougrine and her colleagues note, this sense of being taken away beyond rational thought is a sort of “temporary loss of selfconsciousness characteristic of the flow state” as coined by Csikszentmihalyi (1996). (2014, 397). Do you relate to any of these ways of working? These writers are pretty much self-assured that no matter what they do (and these are industry writers) they are in command of their process. This is not always the case with emerging writers who may need to hang onto the rules of craft a little more as they write. And this is ok. Again, you have to do what works for you. One of the most used and potentially overused quotes in the craft of filmmaking is the one by screenwriter William Goldwyn in his book, Adventures in the Screen Trade: “Nobody knows anything.” Bottom line. Just make sure you have the guts to decide what it is you do know, and use it, or likewise what you don’t know, and find out about it!

Grit and More Grit Taking a break. Leaving off mid-sentence. When you are in flow, it is super exhausting—that executive control network is flat out—even though at the time writing may seem effortless. But sometimes you have to write more than the magic number of hours that you have allocated as the time in which you can do your best work, as a deadline is looming. Like tomorrow! This is when you have to trick your brain to refresh or do things like meditate. Not to state the obvious, but it is unlikely a 90-page script (the industry equivalent of a standard 90-minute feature film where one page of script equals one minute of screen time) will be written overnight. While the dream could be to write 90 pages in few days, the reality is that most feature-length scripts will take a number of months to write, even after the research has been done. So, it is important to master ways and means of keeping on “keeping on” as you write. The basic advice is to keep writing during the first draft phase. Don’t go over what you have written the day before and make it perfect. When I need to take a break and I want to keep on writing I take a heat wheat and douse it in sandalwood essence and lie flat for 20 minutes, during which time I find my brain relaxes and I can start again. The same applies to finishing writing for

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the day. There is lots of advice. Various writers have rituals to keep on going. Some stop mid-sentence, so they have to finish that sentence the next day. Some only read the last sentence they wrote the previous day. Some take notes when they finish and jot down where they think the headlight is. Again, find what works for you. Ways that help you continue to write as you start each of your writing sessions. I share with my students some great tricks I have learnt along the way. Things like never look back at what you have written because all you will want to do is edit it, and after a week of writing you might have one great edited page but nothing else. Editing is for the Shaping and Sharing stage not the Writing and Flow stage of the creative process where you just need to keep writing no matter what! This is a bit like what Bourgeois-Bougrine and her colleagues found where one reported needing to start even though they did not know logistics. I start writing the scene, I know roughly where I want to go, even though I do not really know how to get there, and the fact of writing by following the character makes me find it. (D20) (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 392)

My first ever screenwriting class, “How to Write a Treatment” was run by the Australian Writers Guild and our teacher, an accomplished Australian TV writer, told us he started his writing day with a cup of coffee in hand reading the financial pages of the Australian Financial Review. He shared that this quickly set his brain into what he called his right-brain mode of thinking about his story rather than his left-brain mode of trying to work out what the stocks and shares were doing that day! Interestingly Bourgeois-Bougrine and her colleagues’ research revealed that the writers in their “Creativity Maze” study were very aware of their rational and concrete thinking processes, the need for both creativity and craft skills at the stage of immersion during Writing and Flow: You can have all the talent and all the literary imagination—which are two essential components of the profession—if you don’t have the skills for this tedious task of structuring, you cannot go far. This is something that has more to do with math, a kind of mental structure or consistency: such cause produces such effect. (N15) (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 392)

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For example, I start a scene, I try to write dialogues, and then I realize that it is too early. If you do not know where it all goes, you often find that the dialogues are very poor. So, I always work everything at the same time: I write a synopsis and I start a scene. … It is very mixed, and frankly it’s a bit of a bloody mess. (N12) (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 392)

The ways that those interviewed in this research kept on keeping on with their writing varied. Each had a different technique that worked for them including controls around organizing the outer or accessing the inner worlds of the writer. In terms of organizing the outer world like time and space or the physical script itself, one writer reported setting a sort of routine or ritual of writing till you drop. And suddenly I would say, let’s get started! … I like this frantic process: I get up at 4:30 in the morning, I work all day … it becomes a kind of war plan … I can stay 15 hours completely immersed in my work. (S1) (Bourgeois-­ Bougrine et al. 2014, 392)

For others the process is more like a step into the unknown, or driven by drivers other than themselves. In screenwriting classes that I have taken, writers have shared great ideas with me regarding how they keep on writing. Some inhabit their characters. For example, they make themselves the character by pretending they are taking off their character’s persona from a coat hanger and putting it on. Others literally become their characters, walking and living in the world for the day like them, much like the Method school of acting made famous by Stanislavsky. Piesiewicz says he inhabits his characters so that ultimately it seems that it is they who are doing the writing: If I want to explore a theme, loneliness for example … I look for those protagonists that best express my idea. I do not know how I pick these characters maybe it is by intuition … but once I have found them, I will live with them and spend time with them. Only then can I know what they will do. As I write the script I will never assume or foresee what will happen to my characters. Rather, I write scene by scene as if I myself am living this life. (Piesiewicz in McGrath and MacDermott 2003, 127)

Perhaps though as art can imitate life or vice versa, the screenwriter should be careful of who they are as they write!

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Sometimes, indeed, a character that one has created, or half created, escapes. … There is a moment when, as the story gets built, the characters begin to have some rationality in behaviour that can then lead to a new situation and get the story to progress. (D6) (Bourgeois-Bougrine et  al. 2014, 393) From the dialogues, and in each scene, I really put myself in the skin of the character … then allow myself to be carried over, I let unpredictable things happen, putting myself inside the characters. (D16) (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 393)

Inhabiting a character can of course be part of the research phase, whether you are actually drawing on yourself and your life, or researching completely new experiences as these screenwriters in Bourgeois Bougrine and her colleagues’ research reported: For a film, I worked at the laundry service, I learned to iron with someone there, it was very strange. … For another film I was an intern with the police. For a short film, I spent one morning in an intensive care unit. (N10) (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 393)

Dealing with Roadblocks If you are in the zone and immersed during the complex processes of Writing and Flow with complete focus, you will probably find that by the end of a writing session you will feel somewhat exhausted (and exhilarated!) While we are writing whether or not to the plan or map, we find ourselves continually generating ideas, evaluating them, and using or discarding them. Our processes of craft and creativity are powering together. We are making decisions about which word to use. Asking ourselves would this character say this. Or thinking about whether we need to kill off this darling. Or maybe thinking we can be Oliver Stone or Quentin Tarantino and get away with it all! (The answer to this question is probably not!) Bourgeois-Bougrine and her colleagues found overall that there is a lot of work going on: While writing, the review of the written material results in changing, adding, suppressing, and moving dialogues, scene, and sequences; because the outcome is too long, there are lot of irrelevant details, repetitions, weak links, and so forth. (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 394)

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But sometimes no matter how hard we stick to our plan and show up each day to do the hard yards, the simple fact is that sometimes we seem to get stuck on a certain page. I don’t call this writer’s block, indeed I don’t believe there is such a thing. All we have to do is know the strategy that works for us when we come to a seeming impasse so we can keep on writing. We can try different types of strategies, which indeed Bourgeois-­ Bougrine and her colleagues found is what the screenwriters they interviewed did when confronting the impasse by “seeking support and opinions; a passive strategy or period of incubation; and rational analysis” (Bourgeois-Bougrine et  al. 2014, 394). This is how one screenwriter reported their approach: We progress by asking questions. But the choices are made when you write … then you will start all over again and try to pull the thread for a week. Sometimes it leads to an impasse, you realize that it is no longer tenable … Because the scenario is like a game of dominoes: the action of a character on scene 3 will have consequences not necessarily predictable at the beginning. (S1) (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 394)

So, what do we do when we get stuck? When we reach a roadblock in our writing journey?

A Little Quiet Please: The Place of Meditation and Mindfulness The mind is spiraling. The head is spinning. Sometimes it all seems too much. Too much information. Too much choice. Too much to do. This is the time when we need to take a break. A coffee. A walk. A random chore. All these activities take us out of ourselves and give the brain time to process. Time for the brain to be quiet. Again, there are many names given to this process. But most importantly it is an important part of the creative process—a period of incubation when we basically need to give our mind a bit of space to breathe and reflect and incubate those ideas before the birth of something new. This involves walking away from our screenplay and doing something not related to it. Just slipping in my favorite term from psychology again—doing tasks extraneous to the process. But in fact, they are not extraneous. They are needed. While we probably all know that this is what we need to do when we are writing if we just can’t work out what it is we want to do next, we most likely don’t know that we are

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not alone and that there is a scientific reason why we need to step away. Testament to being not alone—in Bourgeois-Bougrine and her colleagues’ study, most screenwriters “commented on the fact that idea generation occurs frequently during unrelated tasks (e.g., emptying the washing machine, bathing a child, taking public transport, or working alternatively on another film project in a less demanding phase)” (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 397–398). One reported the effectiveness of doing an automatic or habitual task: I’ll start by reading it [the proposal of the director], then I’ll hang out the washing and maybe there I will have an idea. … It could be while giving my daughter a bath … but also when I force myself to write. (S1) (Bourgeois-­ Bougrine et al. 2014, 393)

Another reported how focusing on another project helped: Yes (I work simultaneously on different projects). It is difficult and at the same time, I find it good. Because when I struggle and when I am saturated with a project, being able to switch to another project frees my mind and allows me to find answers to the first. (S1) (Bourgeois-Bougrine et  al. 2014, 394)

Still another reported a version of taking a break that involved walking away in a peaceful and composed state: Like in painting, you need to let it dry. You write a version and then let it rest … then retake it. Because it’s very hard to see it when you have your nose in it. It is exactly like in painting: if you have blue and want it to be red and it is not dry it will become brown. (D16) (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 394)

All these processes involve taking the mind out of the task at hand, the writing. For some this is a deliberate process involving the practice of meditation. For some this is the process of mindfulness or being present in the moment. For some the idea of meditation or mindfulness may seem too forced or unattainable, so it is best to engage in those tasks extraneous to the process! In their other study into screenwriting and psychology, “Collaborative Screenwriting: Social Factors and Psychological Factors” (2018),

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Bourgeois-Bougrine and Glaveanu aligned the social and psychological factors they investigated during the various stages of screenwriting with neurology. Of interest to us is that they proposed that the “passive” state of mind wandering (MW) may be aligned with the findings of neuroimaging studies of the brain (Bourgeois-Bougrine and Glaveanu 2018, 134), which during daydreaming results in action in the associative cortices referred to as default networks (DNT). They quote research that proposes the adaptive role in these networks for “storing, retrieving and manipulating internal information” solving problems that require time to creating plans for future behaviors (2018, 134–135). They further cite research showing that the activation of the DNT has been associated with “constructing dynamic mental simulations based on personal past experiences such as used during remembering, thinking about the future, and generally imagining alternative scenarios to the present” (Bourgeois-Bougrine and Glaveanu 2018, 135). Creativity Coach, Mikkelsen also cites research that helps us understand why mindfulness works when we are in the zone of no distractions allowed! This research sees mindfulness as it relates to creativity as “a deep awareness; a knowing and experiencing of life as it arises and passes away each moment. Mindful awareness is a way of relating to all experience—positive, negative and neutral—in an open receptive way” (Mikkelsen 2020, 40). “Thoughts are registered as just thoughts and the emotions that accompany as simply reactions to present thoughts: unprejudiced receptivity. Such awareness therefore involves the capacity to be aware of internal and external events without the overlay of habitual thoughts’” (Mikkelsen 2020, 40). It would seem from these observations that leaving the brain free to do its thing, be it via mindfulness, MW, or meditation is random and out of our control. But this is not necessarily so. In their ground-breaking research on this distinction, in the article “Exploring the Link Between Mind Wandering, Mindfulness, and Creativity: A Multidimensional Approach” (2018), cognitive psychologist Sergio Agnoli and his colleagues, Manila Vanucci, Claudia Pelagatti, and Giovanni Emanuele Corazza, elegantly give us a definition of mindfulness that really makes sense to me in helping to understand the tricky distinction between mindfulness and meditation. They propose that Mindfulness (MF), which is derived from Buddhist meditation practices, refers to “a state of consciousness, sustained, and focused awareness resulting from a

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nonjudgmental attention to the present moment” and can be enhanced through a regular meditation practice (Agnoli et al. 2018, 43). It is “the awareness of one’s own thoughts, affective states, or physical sensations and the exclusion of distractions from one’s thinking process that is associated with the potential to see creative solutions” (Agnoli et al. 2018, 42). Also of interest to us is that Agnoli and his colleagues showed the practice of mindfulness does not have to be random. They investigated “the distinct contributions of spontaneous and deliberate MW to creative achievement and creative ideation” (Agnoli et al. 2018, 43). What I find helpful for us in our creative writing journey at this or indeed any stage of the creative process, is this research that shows that MW can be deliberate or spontaneous. Who would have thought? “In the case of deliberate MW, attention is shifted from the focal task to internal thoughts, whereas in the case of spontaneous MW, task-related thoughts capture one’s attention, triggering an uncontrolled shift from the task at hand to other trains of thought” (Agnoli et al. 2018, 42). To help us understand how mindfulness can be part of our creative practice, Agnoli and his colleagues remind us—as we also explored in Chap. 2—that neuroscientific research has highlighted that “Creative thinking is … characterized by a complex process involving both implicit associative processes and explicit control processes” (Agnoli et al. 2018, 42). It is a complex process involving “a top-down executive process characterized by many control processes (inhibition of interfering stimuli, inhibition of dominant but not novel responses, judging and refining of initial ideas” (Agnoli et al. 2018, 42). Agnoli and his colleagues cite Lebuda, Zabelina, and Karwowski’s (2015) work that showed “that mindfulness and creativity were significantly related” (2018, 43). They note that “Creativity might stem from a process characterized by a lack of executive control over one’s mental activity, a process that can be described as getting lost in one’s thoughts” or it could be “the awareness of one’s own thoughts, affective states, or physical sensations and the exclusion of distractions from one’s thinking process that is associated with the potential to see creative solutions”, which have been conceptualized in psychological science as MW and mindfulness (Agnoli et al. 2018, 42). As Agnoli and his colleagues note, research has revealed mindfulness’s benefit to cognitive and emotional functioning with reported improvement to working memory capacity, ability to control stress, and fear of judgment by others (Agnoli et al. 2018, 43). This is just what we need to

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understand as creatives as we are at the work in progress stage where our work is not yet completed to our own satisfaction! Agnoli and his colleagues also remind us that mindfulness is multifaceted and involves “the ability to observe and attend to different stimuli (observing), the ability to focus attention with full awareness (acting with awareness), the ability to describe feelings and beliefs with words (describing), the ability to not react to inner experience (being nonreactive) and the ability to not judge the experience (not judging)” (Agnoli et  al. 2018, 43) They also note that no research has investigated the part that deliberate and spontaneous MW may play in mindfulness, noting that research has assumed that mindfulness and MW are considered opposite phenomena (Agnoli et al. 2018, 44). They observe that their research provided the first exploration of “the interactive role of MW and mindfulness dimensions with respect to the prediction of creativity” and showed that these dimensions “interacted to explain creative behavior” (Agnoli et al. 2018, 48) in the various measures used to judge creativity in the literature, either by creative performance (as measured by divergent thinking tasks) or creative achievement as measured by a creative thinking performance index (response originality on a divergent thinking task) (Agnoli et al. 2018, 44). In this great research, Agnoli and his colleagues found two things that are super important to us at this stage where we are actually writing our story and depending on how we like to work, more or less in control of our story. At the inspiration and envisioning stage of the creative process we found that it was helpful to be in a state of MW or daydreaming as indicated by the research and interviews Bourgeois-Bourgine and her colleagues did in “The Creativity Maze” (2014). However, daydreaming or spontaneous MW is different from mindfulness. In the stage where we are at now—mindfulness—directed MW if you like, is really helpful as Agnoli and his colleagues found in what I think is revolutionary research. This is what they found. The control over the MW state can be considered a central element in the creative production insofar as it may increase response originality by introducing thought not apparently related to the creative focus into the thinking process. Spontaneous mindwandering was, on the contrary, detrimental to originality, suggesting once again the control of the thinking process is a central requirement for creative thinking. (Agnoli et al. 2018, 50)

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Agnoli and his colleagues also note that: Without the ability to adequately describe thoughts or mental products, even the most original ideas could indeed not achieve success … that deliberate MW can increase the beneficial effects of the ability to describe internal experiences with words, as if the attitude to deliberately get lost in task unrelated thoughts could help describe complex and creative ideas to an external world. (Agnoli et al. 2018, 49)

So now we can understand why it is important to do those “tasks extraneous to the process”. This is in fact deliberate MW. We are in the zone of an automatic task, liberated for a moment from the solutions we are trying to see in our writing, but nonetheless the questions that will lead us to the answer to these questions, are free to circulate in our brain as we give it a bit of space from pumping out those words at the keyboard. In fact, to choose to take a break when you are writing to do an automatic task like hanging out the washing, or checking the post is deliberate MW. It is demonstrating metacognitive control over the process. We know how we are thinking and we know what we need to do about it. As Agnoli and his colleagues remind us, research from psychology has shown the control of your thinking process can result in higher originality: The importance of deliberate metacognitive controls over the creative process has been already highlighted in past research … metacognition (i.e., control over goal setting, planning, use of cognitive processes, etc.) is one of the main prerequisites for creative thinking … the ability to control the switch of attention from the actual focal task could be considered a main mechanism to manage the introduction of irrelevant information into the divergent thinking process … which is a main attentional mechanism yielding higher originality. (Agnoli et al. 2018, 50)

In Chap. 9, we will consider the Creativity Metacognitive Framework (McVeigh 2020; Mcveigh in McVeigh et al. 2023, 5) as a means of providing a scaffold for how you want to focus your thinking about your thinking as you write at the Inspiration and Envisioning stage of the creative process. But before we do this, there are a few more gems we need to take from the psychology research to assist us in our journey.

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Being More Mindful Developmental psychology research has found that mindfulness training can enhance the processes of creative thinking. Philip Janz and his colleagues Sharon Dawe and Melissa Wyllie, in their 2019 research, “Mindfulness-Based Program Embedded Within the Existing Curriculum Improves Executive Functioning and Behaviour in Young Children: A Waitlist Controlled Trial” applied existing research to demonstrate that we can stay focused, avoid defaulting to habit, and be adaptative and flexible to see things in a new and different way by mindfulness training (Janz et al. 2019, 2). Their research also underlined the findings we have discussed elsewhere. That there are reasons that we need to allow our brain to do its work. It is working hard. Remember that Executive Control Centre. This is what it is doing, things that an executive does, they control those top-down executive processes, such as “cognitive flexibility and sustained attention” (Janz et al. 2019, 3). “Executive functions (EFs) consist of three, interrelated core skills: inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. … From these, higher-order EFs such as reasoning, problem-solving, and planning are built” (Janz et al. 2019, 2). This is a lot of work, and it needs to be done as we are thinking creatively. But again, remember via metacognitive thinking, the awareness we are developing in this book, that you are in control. Janz and his colleagues also remind us in their research that there are thinking procedures in place in the brain that facilitate this complex higher-order thinking to block out impediments. This includes mindfulness that minimizes “the effects of bottom­up influences such as anxiety and stress”, and that this involves “training to develop a specific brain state that is consistent with brain activity associated with a quiet alert state, that in turn allows for focused attention” (Janz et al. 2019, 3) Being mindful does not mean you have to get into yoga gear and chant or listen to meditation tapes. Being mindful can be practiced when walking in nature, patting the dog, hanging out the washing or staring out the window. Times when the brain has time and space to churn. The knowledge we have gained here is that it is important to let the brain do its thing. As Agnoli and his colleagues found “Creativity might stem from a process characterized by a lack of executive control over one’s mental activity, a process that can be described as getting lost in one’s thoughts” (Agnoli et al. 2018, 42). To give it time and space to process by doing for example automatic tasks like tidying your desk is one of the key takeaways

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from this research. This is not procrastination; it is a necessary part of the creative process at any stage. Before we go onto Chap. 8, let’s take a step away from our writing for a moment, take a look at the “What If?” activities. Choose one and have a go at being in the moment of doing a task extraneous to our process!

What If? The suggested exercises in this section connect with the work we have been discussing in this chapter where for the most part you will be in flow as you write the first draft of your screenplay. The exercises are designed to help you when you just want to step out of flow for a moment. Perhaps to double check that tricky beast, structure, to throw in the chance event to turn your screenplay into a different direction by using a different set of headlights. Or maybe to take a walk and sit in a café to top up your creative well with a new or fresh idea that may just be the answer to a structural, character, or dialogue conundrum that you are trying to gain insight into. Whichever exercise you choose. Have fun! 1. Structure Exercise—Tableaux (Gardiner 2019, 210) This is a great collaborative exercise that can be done to check the structure of one of your screenplay sequences with your writing group or during a workshop. Form groups of three. The workshop leader or script editor gives each group a word—“an abstract noun such as loss, joy, betrayal, victory” (Gardiner 2019, 210). The group then plans a tableau for that idea using elements of your sequence and presents it to the workshop who try to identify the idea. Then participants choose two of the other tableaux from the group to add to their own so they have a sequence of three. The groups then devise a scene or sequence using each tableau— one being the beginning, one the middle, and one the end. The workshop then orders them to create a journey for an audience. “The scene then transforms from the first abstract noun (say joy) moving through to another (betrayal) and ending in the third (loss)”. The workshop begins in a “freeze, then unfreeze and improvise dialogue (realistic or stylised) that moves towards the middle tableau/image; they freeze, then move and improvise more dialogue to end on the last frozen tableau” (Gardiner

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2019, 210). This is a great exercise to visualize and analyze the structure of a scene or sequence as well as free up thinking about where to place events (this does not have to be chronological), conveying essential information and creating tension while avoiding overwriting by coming in late and leaving early. 2. The Chance Event Add a chance event or character to your screenplay and see what happens. To do this think about the events of your screenplay and put the main scene headings on cards. These may be taken from your beat sheet or other working document. Shuffle the pack and see what happens. Events may happen in a new and interesting order. Characters may appear or disappear at times that create tension and intrigue. Many writers do this to break patterns of habitual thinking or add in the chance event. A good way to really shake this exercise up is to make or choose a pack of cards like Tarot or a random line from a song or poem and add this to your story. See what happens! 3. Listening in Eavesdrop on someone’s conversation. Or record it. It can be between strangers at a cafe, the train station, a party, waiting in line somewhere. Or it can be someone you know. Write down what you can or what you can remember from the conversation. Keep eavesdropping till you have a selection of quotes that grab you. Look at them and either use a line as the basis for stream of consciousness writing or more detailed planning work. Maybe ask yourself questions about these people who may inform elements of your screenplay characters’ backstories? What led them to say what they did? What are they going to do about it? Or maybe have a couple of the characters meet each other using some of the conversations and see what happens as you write. Transcribe these snippets. Look at what you have written with your eagle eye and see what you find interesting but also note how truncated real conversations are. Rewrite your screenplay big print and dialogue emulating this real life research so that we get a feel for the visual.

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References Agnoli, Sergio, Manila Vanucci, Claudia Pelagatti, and Giovanni Emanuele Corazza. 2018. Exploring the Link Between Mind Wandering, Mindfulness, and Creativity: A Multidimensional Approach. Creativity Research Journal 30 (1): 41–53. Bordwell, David. 1985. Narration and the Fiction Film. Madison Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. Bourgeois-Bougrine, Samira, and Vlad P.  Glaveanu. 2018. Collaborative Screenwriting: Social Factors and Psychological Factors. In The Creative Process: Perspectives from Multiple Domains, ed. T. Lubart. Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan. Bourgeois-Bougrine, Samira, Vlad Glaveanu, Marion Botella, K. Guillou, P.M. de Biasi, and Todd Lubart. 2014. The Creativity Maze: Exploring Creativity in Screenplay Writing. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 8 (4): 384–399. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0037839. Csikszentmihalyi, M. 1996. Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. New York: Harper-Collins. Gardiner, Paul. 2019. Teaching Creativity in Practice: Playwrighting. Sydney, Australia: Bloomsbury Publishing. Janz, Philip, Sharon Dawe, and Melissa Wyllie. 2019. Mindfulness-Based Program Embedded Within the Existing Curriculum Improves Executive Functioning and Behaviour in Young Children: A Waitlist Controlled Trial. Frontiers in Psychology 10: Article 2052. September. www.frontiersin.org. Kaufman, Scott Barry, and Carolyn Gregoire. 2016. Wired to Create. New York: TarcherPerigee, Imprint of Penguin Random House. Lamont, Anne. 1995. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. Scribe Publications. Lebuda, Izabela, Zabelina, D. L., and Karwowski, Maciej. 2015. Mind Full of Ideas: A Meta-Analysis of the Mindfulness—Creativity Link. Personality and Individual Differences 93: 22–26. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2015.09.040. Lynch, David. 2007. Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity. New York: Penguin. McVeigh, Margaret. 2020. Creativity and Creative Practice: Towards A Meta-­ Cognitive Domain Specific Framework for Writing and Making for the Screen. MIC Creativity Conference, Marconi Institute of Creativity, Bologna Italy 14–19 Sept 2020. Unpublished conference paper. McVeigh, Margaret, Valquaresma, Andreia and Karwowski, Maciej. 2023. Fostering Creative Agency through Screenwriting: An Intervention. Creativity Research Journal 5. https://doi.org/10.1080/10400419.2023.2168341. Mikkelsen, Thea. 2020. Coaching the Creative Impulse: Psychological Dynamics and Professional Creativity. Routledge.

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Piesiewicz, Krzysztof. 2003. Screencraft: Screenwriting. eds. Declan McGrath and Felim MacDermott, 126–138. Switzerland: Rotovision SA. Sheridan, Jim. 2003. Screencraft: Screenwriting. eds. Declan McGrath and Felim MacDermott, 52–64. Switzerland: Rotovision SA. Towne, Robert. 2003. Screencraft: Screenwriting. eds. Declan McGrath and Felim MacDermott, 138–152. Switzerland: Rotovision SA.

CHAPTER 8

It Could be More: Sharing and Shaping

Abstract  This chapter takes writing from the inside to the outside at the important time when the individual screenwriter’s screenplay is shared with others. At this stage of sharing the first draft screenplay starts the process of being potentially shaped by the feedback of others, for better or worse. This is industry practice and an important aspect of the screenwriting journey that a writer must learn to master. Writing can be destroyed by inappropriate feedback. The screenwriter can be shattered by being open to show work that he or she knows is only at the first stage of development. Findings from cognitive psychology and neuroscience regarding the enrichment that good collaborations bring to a screenplay, and the personal factors that the writer may acknowledge or develop to become resilient and maintain their vision, are introduced as a way of considering fruitful development of the script as it is considered original, novel, or creative in the domain. In the journey of writing and rewriting craft factors which increase the likelihood of more creative work, including the use of metaphor and the application of aesthetic evaluation, are considered from a craft perspective and underlined by findings from cognitive psychology and neuroscience. The work of the chapter is encapsulated under the

Work in Progress Creative Process Stage: Sharing and Shaping Craft Stage: Script Editing, Table Read © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. McVeigh, Screenwriting from the Inside Out, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40520-4_8

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framework heading “Work in Progress” which crystallizes the relevant stage of thinking and writing like a creative. The “Creative Process Stage” explores key creativity theory and the “Craft Stage” backgrounds key screenwriting theory. The “What If?” section of the chapter is a concluding coda of three activities for thinking and writing like a creative, drawn from the ideas developed in the chapter. Keywords  Screenwriting • Creativity • Creative process • Editing • First draft … there will be time To prepare a face to meet the facers that you meet: There will be time to murder and create, And time for all the works and days of hands That lift and drop a question on your plate: Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea From “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” (TS Eliot 1915)

It Could Be More! Phew! You have done it! You have done that thing which you could not have imagined you could do when you set out to write the first draft of your screenplay. If you have left it a few days and go back to read what you have written, you may be amazed. I find so often that what you have written if you have really worked hard at the process is something you cannot believe has flowed from your pen or keyboard. Hold onto this feeling because unless you do, the awe and knowledge that what you have written is unique, beautiful, and just a first draft with work required to shape it into the next or next of many drafts, may be shattered. You can too easily lose your way if you are not steadfast in holding onto the central core of what it is you set out to write. There will be directors, producers, funding bodies, friends, and family who may give advice and insights that you want to hear, need to or maybe don’t need to hear. This is where I really do some work with my students to ground them in the essentials of the creative self-belief and motivation that guided them on

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their screenwriting journey to get to this stage, so that no one can take their vision and unique voice from them while a work is potentially still at first draft. Here is where I love to bring in some of the psychology theory that supports the fact that creative people tend to behave or need to behave in certain ways to stay strong to their vision and unique in their voice as a “creative”. One of the field’s foremost creativity researchers, Mark Runco in the chapter, “Education Based on a Parsimonious Theory of Creativity” in Ron Beghetto and James C.  Kaufman’s edited book, Nurturing Creativity in the Classroom, Cambridge University Press (2010), asks “what is at the heart of a simple theory of creativity?” In answering this basic question and conducting a broad overview of the literature to distil a simple idea of creativity, he proposes what he calls the Correlates of Creative Behaviour. In doing so he identifies what constitutes these correlates (Runco 2010, 243). I read these in full to my students at the Shaping and Sharing stage to fortify them for this next stage of their creative journey when they will share their work, still in its infancy, with the world. I believe it is good to know that Runco’s is proven research and it works, because as emerging writers it is too easy to get side-tracked into thinking that what others say is right. It is important therefore as a creative who is sharing their work for the first time, to practice the following Correlates of Creative Behavior: autonomy—stand up for one’s ideas, individual practice and comfortable with unconventional ideas taking, courage—to resist the pressures to conform, allows to explore unconventional ideas, express original actions explore unusual interests, wide interests—therefore wide knowledge base and open, demonstrating flexibility and ability to shift perspectives, openness—open to experience—“personal and abstract as well as social, environmental and concrete” and therefore potential of new and different ideas tolerance—creatives can be non-conformists but teachers in the classroom need also to practice tolerance authenticity—spontaneous and self-actualized—honest in an intrapersonal sense (Maslow) risk taking—tolerate risk and seek out situations that are ambiguous and complex. (Runco 2010, 244)

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I suggest you read these attributes again and think about them deeply. These are the attributes of the creative personality that have got you to this stage of the creative process. You have written a script that showcases your unique voice. This is authenticity and potentially risk taking. You have worked hard to find the kernels of inspiration and research that will drive your script—metaphor, the dramatic center, universal themes. This demonstrates your openness and wide interests, as well as a tolerance in this case, for the ambiguity of not knowing where your story will take you. Now as you prepare to share your story with others all these characteristics will stand you in good stead. Most likely you are going to have to draw really strongly on the attributes of risk taking, courage, and most importantly I believe, autonomy. There is no doubt that it is a risk for a writer to share their work when it is a rough first draft. There are not many professions where this is par for the course. Imagine if a builder says this is just a first draft house I have built and I want your feedback before I build the second draft? I believe writers more than anyone, are called upon to channel all the aspects of the successful creative personality as they go about their work. In the next sections we will look at the creative process stage of Shaping and Sharing the first draft of the script. Most importantly, we must remember that a script is a blueprint, it is not a finished work. It is like an architectural plan that other creatives—the producer and the director, as well as the cinematographer, art director, sound designer, editor, and many others—will use to bring your story to the screen. And as is industry protocol they will give you feedback. So, in choosing to write a screenplay we can’t really be precious. We have to make decisions about what feedback we will take on board as we work through the many drafts of our script until it is decided that “this is the final draft” that will be used to shoot the film. In the meantime, until you receive the green light, there are people you will have to work with as noted above. If you are lucky, they are already part of your tribe. People you trust. Such is the case for Andrew Stanton (Toy Story, 1995; The Incredibles, 2004): I work very differently from other screenwriters, because at Pixar I work as part of a group. Once we have the germ of an idea and need to expound upon it, I go off into a room and am stuck with myself like every other writer. But I have the luxury of coming out of that room and having this group of guys who I trust with my creative life, to bounce ideas off and give me feedback to make the script better. (Stanton in McGrath and MacDermott 2003, 114)

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However, most likely there will be many people who don’t know you will read your script and you will have to decide whether or not to trust their advice. This is where we again revisit the attributes of the creative personality and what you will need to draw upon to shape your best work at this stage.

Putting It Out There The first public sharing of your script is likely to be a table read—literally a reading around a table with fellow screenwriting students, colleagues, or family and friends who you rope into reading the characters of your screenplay. It may be a carefully orchestrated reading where your teacher involves your fellow screenwriting students in a guided feedback session that focuses on the positives and highlights areas for future work. If you are lucky, professional actors may read your script and you will be able to hear how it works or does not work. I just love it if this is the situation but no matter what, “A reading is an investigation of a text where one discovers the strengths and weaknesses in the writing. A reading is not about entertaining or performing for each other. It is about hearing the text come alive and having a discussion about the problems of the text and how to solve them” (Redvall 2009, 46). You will hear what others say, you will feel what you feel, you will know there is something great there, or that there is something that needs work. Then you will have to make decisions about where to from here. First and foremost, you will be most likely thinking about what is unique and original about your screenplay and this is what I suggest you hold onto, no matter what. Think about “what is non-negotiable here”? Think about what craft skills you can deploy to take your work to the next level? Think about what sort of aesthetic judgments or values you will use to make decisions to help you shape the next draft of your work. To address this creative decision making, I go a little bit outside the square of usual cognitive psychology research to a new field—that of neuroecomomics—no this is not about the business field of economics but the study of the “the computations the brain carries out to make value-based decisions, as well as the biophysical implementation of those computations” (Lin and Vartanian 2018, 656). Another field I hear you say. What is she thinking! Never fear there is, to use a cliché—method in my madness!

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In their “Neuro-economic Framework for Creative Cognition”, Lin and Vartanian postulate a neurobiological model based on the way we make choices from the alternatives available to us, based on what we perceive is the most value at the time. They call this an adaptive maximizing valuebased decision-making process for how the brain produces and selects ideas that incorporate the “novel” and useful” paradigm that marks creativity in their context. A key insight from their research that is relevant to screenwriting, is their assertion that research suggests that “brain networks that process subjective valuation are also implicated in aesthetic judgements”, which they argue, also extends to creative cognition (Lin and Vartanian 2018, 658). They go on to suggest that “within the context of creativity, the value of an idea will also be dynamically constructed from the weighted sum, product, or both attributes in this case, attributes such as novelty and usefulness” (Lin and Vartanian 2018, 658). They also cite research noting that the “valuation processes reflect the integration of information from sensory and memory related regions” as an “important factor supporting the role of value-based decision making in the evaluation of ideas” (Lin and Vartanian 2018, 659). Their framework explores the processes of idea exploitation and idea exploration during creative cognition. They also postulate that “the network dynamics observed during creative cognition are driven by value computations in regions within the brain’s valuation system … which jointly optimize the trade-off between idea exploitation and idea exploration” (Lin and Vartanian 2018, 667). To apply this to the decisions a screenwriter makes as they select ideas for script development and refine ideas in the script editing process, one may apply their analysis of the dynamic interactions between and within “large scale brain networks, especially the default-mode network (DMN) and the executive control network” (Lin and Vartanian 2018, 667). Of interest to us is the fact that Lin and Vartanian overview research which suggests that the “DMN and executive control network are engaged in different types of tasks. Specifically, the DMN is activated by tasks that involve internally directed processes, such as self-generated thought, simulation of future events, and spontaneous thought, and it exhibits decreased activation during tasks that involve external stimuli” while executive control network activity “increases during tasks that require attention to external stimuli”. Ultimately, they cite research to postulate that while these two areas support different aspects of creativity in that “the DMN supports the generation of creative ideas, the executive control network modulates activity in the DMN to ensure that task goals are met (Lin

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and Vartanian 2018, 667). They also postulate that “the network dynamics observed during creative cognition are driven by value computations in regions within the brain’s valuation system … which jointly optimize the tradeoff between idea exploitation and idea exploration” (Lin and Vartanian 2018, 667). So why am I reiterating some of this research which we have previously discussed albeit from a different perspective from that in the work of Lin and Vartanian? Lin and Vartanian are neuroscientists, so their research is based on observing activations in the brain as the creative processes so essential to editing and shaping a work are enacted. These include “self-generated thought”. We as writers, for example may be thinking craft decisions about whether the character in our screenplay would actually say what they are saying, or wear what they are wearing. Or whether for example, there is enough jeopardy to create the building of dramatic tension so essential to leading to a climax. At the same time, we are evaluating different scenarios, “a simulation of future events”, to see if, for example, a different plot point would achieve the tension we want in our story. Also of great import at this stage of our thinking is the observation that Lin and Vartanian make about how the “boss”, the executive control network that makes the final decision, and “exhibits decreased activation during tasks that involve external stimuli”. Here I think it is obvious that if we are overloading ourselves with external stimuli, we are not giving our brain a fair go to do its best work. External stimuli are most likely different for all of us. For me it is loud bass music, whipper snippers and leaf blowers, but on the other hand I can drown our screaming kids and traffic. Go figure!

What Are We Looking For? The actual process of editing again varies for everyone. In the many years I have been teaching and learning screenwriting craft, I have found a few methods that work for myself and my students. However, there are many others. One of the things I like to do, as I said earlier, is separate the place where I do what I think of as my generative creative work (my colorful study with my beautiful iMac computer) from the cutting table, the straight back chair I sit in overlooking the garden with a print out of a draft and a pen to circle and arrow to slash or move parts of the script I want to work on. One of the things I learnt at the very beginning of my screenwriting journey, was to not try to fix everything at once. It is helpful to read the screenplay a number of times to do a “pass”, looking at only

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one thing at a time. One pass might be just to read the big print and see if that is visual and evocative. One might be to just read the words of the main character. One might be to plot those story beats creating the story structure. Again, how you do this is a matter of choice. One of my screenwriting teachers used color-coding, where various highlighter colors represent various “passes”. I think this is a fabulous idea. I tried it but it did not work for me. But it could work for you! Many of the screenwriting books from the “gurus” have some great ideas to help you through the edit stage. They will usually guide you through the big factors impacting the craft of screenwriting with some really good advice. Find the one that works for you as there is a lot happening as Bourgeois-Bougrine and her colleagues found in their “Creativity Maze” research: Quite often while developing dialogues and scenes, what has been planned can be abandoned; new ideas are generated, tested, and implemented, which will have an impact on what has been, already written—a classic ‘domino effect.’ The choice between new alternatives or ideas leads to the rewriting or suppression of previous dialogues and scenes. These processes occur in a cyclical manner until the task is completed. (Bourgeois-­ Bougrine et  al. 2014, 393–394)

Some of the areas I have found usually need more work from my many years of reading student scripts, include the following. Lack of theme. Basically “why would we care?” Too many characters. In fact, who is the main character? Lack of jeopardy or indeed no jeopardy. On the nose dialogue that might be okay in a novel but not a screenplay. Meaning you are writing the characters saying what they think rather than showing what they are feeling. The old “show don’t tell”. Resorting to cliché is another. Like a character looking at a photo and we see a flashback. Not original. Or flashback in general to describe something in the present, if it is not part of a deliberate structure you have set up but just a handy way of showing why something happened because you can’t think of another way to do this. Don’t go there!. Last but not least, overwriting—explaining in tedious detail what a character is wearing when we first see them. Remember film is a visual language and an actor will be working on your script. You need your script to breathe so that anyone playing one of your characters can work with the essence of the character you have created, and use their own artform to bring that character to life.

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In their research, Bourgeois-Bougrine and her colleagues found that screenwriters were quite specific about what they needed to do at the Shaping and Sharing stage of the creative process. And they used a variety of approaches. One scriptwriter used our “fishing net” metaphor to describe their strategy: When your fishing net is tangled, full of knots, the only way is to untangle it without reflecting too much on how it became tangled. You must ease things, restart the game. In doing this, in general, we find quite naturally the things and logic of the craft. Being annoyed and pulling means getting stuck (D9). (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 394)

Another went back to those workin-progress documents, specifically the outline, to use as sort of litmus test to see what might be not working in the draft. When I reread the dialogues, I am more in the detail of the scenes. The fact of returning to the outline allows me to take some distance from the script and better see what might be wrong there. Because in the script, there is already the affect: we started to love our scenes, to make our characters speak; we become attached to a particular moment, a particular dialogue … we then struggle to understand where the problem is or to cut when it is too long. The outline, which is much colder object than the script allows it. It is very boring to read (S2). (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 394–395)

The cognitive psychology research that can be applied to editing at the Sharing and Shaping stage of the creative process is best encapsulated in the 2013 article “Creativity as action: findings from five creative domains” by Vlad Glaveanu, Todd Lubart, Nathalie Bonnardel, Marion Botella, and others, including Franck Zenasni. The domains they investigated include art, design, science, music, and screenwriting. The work-in-progress elements they collated from the writers they interviewed in this study can serve as a great checklist for you to use to self-edit. They include these observations from working screenwriters: There is a materiality of the script and a moment in the process where it seems to take “a life of its own” (L2), when “the logic of the story is gradually unfolding” (L3). This moment is essential and needs to be captured because it signals that the project is on the right track (L1) and is taking the lead (L11). The characters have an important part to play in this unfolding

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given that, as they develop, they gain in power, become “alive” (L6) and start following a logic that imposes itself (L7). In a conflict between structure and characters, it is the characters that usually win (L12). This is part of the “laws” of dramaturgy—norms that generally guide the construction of the story (L5). Ultimately, another constant form of material undergoing has to do with re-reading the script, normally out loud (L8, L10), and sometimes by acting or miming the scene (L10). (Glaveanu et al. 2013, 9)

Finally, to start your first edit (which you would usually do before you share with anyone), I suggest once you have written your rough first draft go to your special editing place and read your script aloud. If you feel something is not working, mark it so you can go back and think about why. As well as using the checklist above, I particularly like what Linda Seger offers as a starting point in your evaluation to guide your edit. In the first chapter of her book, Making a Good Writer Great. A Creativity Workbook for Screenwriters, she asks the screenwriter to write a letter to themselves about why they love the idea for their script and to envision why others will rave about it. She then asks the writer to seal this letter and put it away until after they have written their script (1999, 4). In the final chapter she asks the writer to check in on how they feel about their script and how they may like to edit it by answering the following questions: What was your intention? By reiterating your intention do you get some ideas of what to rewrite? Do you have concerns about your script?Have you lost your passion for it? Are you wondering if it’s any good at all? If so, open that letter that wrote to yourself in Chapter one. [the Inspiration and Envisioning stage] Let the letter reawaken your passion, your vision, your excitement about your work. Let the letter guide you during this last stage of the process, as you match up your script with your original vision of it. (Seger 1999, 206)

Editing can take a long time or a short time. It depends on what work you need to do, or think you need to do. In the end, the edit finishes when you decide it does and you go to the next stage. The psychology research again comes to the fore with quantitative research in the area. Marion Botella, Franck Zenasni, and Todd Lubart in the 2018 article “What Are the Stages of the Creative Process? What Visual Art Students Are Saying” categorize “finalization” as corresponding to:

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[a]t least in part, to the finition phase. … [F]inalization implies that the individual has decided that his/her work is finished. If the artist considers the work to be successful and satisfactory and they may choose to exhibit it. In that case, the stage of finalization also includes hanging up or exhibiting the work. (Botella et al. 2018, 10)

While this research relates to art students it applies equally to screenwriters who are artists in their domain. So here we go… Sharing your screenplay for the first time after you have done your own first edit, or if you are doing an edit based on feedback, sharing it again.

Feedback. Good or Bad? Feedback really takes two forms. Your self-feedback which is in essence your first self-edit or the start of the Shaping stage of the creative process. With all the tools of creativity and craft at your disposal you are in control here. So, let’s tick that one off as something you are in control of as you are in the driver’s seat to make sure your work is something novel and original in the domain of screenwriting. As a teacher of screenwriting, I believe that to be given the opportunity to read my students’ work at first-draft stage is a great honor. It marks significant trust and bravery for any writer to show work that they know is not yet complete to another, so I am always careful in giving feedback. More importantly I have seen work shattered because a student believed that they needed to address feedback that so-called experts or well meaning friends and family gave them because they wanted to please. I ask my students when they are seeking feedback to write down questions that they want a reader to address so that they still hold the power. If you are going to ask someone who is not a screenwriter to give feedback, simply ask them, “Is there anything that did not work for you here?” That’s all you need to ask. You will then be able to think about what it could be that is not working—if indeed you believe this is the case. Bottom line. As we have learnt, one of the most important attributes of the creative personality is independent thinking and this is where this attribute is super important. It’s the feedback from others that I believe can make or break the original and passionate work of a screenwriter, and it is I believe something that you are totally in control of. Because as a creative person you can exercise one of the most powerful attributes of the

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successful creative—independent thinking—or as Runco advises “autonomy”—the ability to “stand up for one’s ideas, individual practice and [being] comfortable with unconventional ideas taking” (Runco 2010, 243–244). Essentially there are those who will have good ideas and those who will have bad ideas regarding your work. You have to choose what advice you take on board. As one of the screenwriters Bourgeois-Bougrine and her colleagues interviewed so beautifully reflected: There are good and bad readers. For example, [name of a director] is a very good reader, and [name], who is a producer, can also be a good reader … what is very important to me is when a reader opens a new angle of the story we had not seen ourselves. Then it becomes interesting! Bad readers cling to details, say for example, “But this girl, shouldn’t she be blonde, rather than brunette?” With this, you cannot do much. (N12) (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 393)

On the other hand, sometimes we are too close to our work and an outsider can give us really good suggestions as this screenwriter notes: Often, and this is the advantage of cowriting with a director, when one blocks, the other can find the solution. It can also be a third party, the producer for example. … Once, with the director, we were both floundering; nose glued on our characters, we could not have the necessary distance. … And it was the producer of the film, reading the script, working on it, who found the solution. (S20) (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 394)

You are going to have to deal with a lot of experts and nonexperts in the sharing of your script as Bourgeois Bougrine and her colleagues found in the interviews they conducted with screenwriters in their research. Here are just some glimpses of what you might encounter in this part of your screenwriting journey: Everyone has an opinion and should be taken into account more or less. The director would say, “My wife did not like the end,” “The sponsor does not want a child martyr.” … And you are forced to constantly adapt. (N13) (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 395) The producer will say, e.g., “This character is not friendly enough. Give him a more sympathetic character. Maybe if he was a musician as well, or if he feeds the pigeons, etc. (D16) (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 395)

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The producer wanted this actor, the director, who sometimes is forced to compromise, began to doubt … Anyway, we rewrote almost 10 different ends to this project, and the last one, which eventually convinced the actor and the producer, and is perhaps the one that will be filmed, is in my opinion at odds with everything we had originally imagined. So, in this instance, I am a bit disappointed. (D20) (Bourgeois-Bougrine et al. 2014, 395)

That’s a lot of different voices potentially giving feedback to your script. So, bottom line as a creative. Be prepared to hold your line. Go back to the essence of your script. Your truth. The dramatic center. The myth you are reinterpreting. The first scene you saw in your mind. Whatever it was that impelled you to write your story and use this as the litmus test to whether or not you will take on board the feedback, whether it be good or bad.

It Could Be Still More One of the greatest screenwriting workshops I ever went to was run by Screen Australia at the Sydney Dance Studio under the Sydney Harbour Bridge. I was so lucky in this workshop to learn from Joan Scheckel who Screen Australia brought down-under to help develop Australia’s screenwriting talent. While Joan Scheckel and her work is a book in itself, there is one takeaway from the workshop I attended that I would like to share with you. Joan’s heartfelt advice (and she shares the backstory to this in her workshop) was “it could be more”. It could be more is no autodidact statement about you just have to work harder. It could be more is based on Method acting and is about emotion and the ways in which we can work more to connect with our audiences. In this section, I use Joan’s beautiful phrase to ask you to think about ways in which your work “could be more”. The ways that I have found that work for my students to make their work “more”—deeper, richer, and unique, usually coalesce around these three attributes of a great screenplay: subtext, metaphor, dialogue, and visual writing. (Assuming you have ticked the boxes on structure, format, and character!) Writing a screenplay is as we have said a unique art form. A screenplay is a working document whose story is not realized until the actual film is made. No one (except students of screenwriting) will usually pick up a screenplay to read like they would read a novel or poetry. However, a screenplay does contain elements of the novel in telling a good

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story—theme, character, and plot. It also contains elements of poetry. A screenplay suggests what we will see on screen in the present tense. It describes the location, interior or exterior, time of day and what the characters are doing in the big print. We get to understand how the characters are feeling and thinking by what they say and do. We cannot see inside their heads like we do in a novel where we can read the characters’ thoughts. So, the next level work of writing a screenplay is in good visual writing—writing what we can see while suggesting the sub-text of what the characters are thinking by what we write the screenwriting axiom. “Show. Don’t tell”. A good way of checking on subtext—what the character is really thinking, rather than perhaps what they are saying, is to think about the action of the scene in terms of Stanislavski, or more recently Judith Weston’s approach to training actors. In using Judith Weston’s approach, you can think about what the character wants in the scene and workshop this with friends or colleagues as part of your writing process. Each scene has what Weston calls “given circumstances”. But if you change what the character wants in the scene this can dramatically affect the dialogue or the subtext. For example, in one run through of the scene you can have your character enter the scene wanting “to seduce”. In another run through you can have them enter the scene wanting “to accuse”. The given circumstances are the same no matter what the character wants. See what happens to your subtext and dialogue if you try this. Renowned screenwriter Robert Towne (Chinatown, 1974; The Firm, 1993; Mission Impossible II, 2000) highlights the importance of his training as an actor in his screenwriting: My training as a writer began in an acting class … You … learn that the actual words people use are not nearly as important as the intent behind them. In that class I would improvise … we were given situations as basic as this: there are two of you and you know the tother will die if she goes through a certain door, but you are not allowed to mention either death or the door. Through improvising situations like these, you learn to communicate something without directly mentioning it. This is important in all forms of dramatic writing as people usually say one thing and mean another. This applies to screenwriting more than any other form, because the picture ­conveys so much information that it is almost impossible for dialogue to add to it. (Towne 2003, 139)

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Dialogue is super tricky. Too much dialogue and the screenplay seems forced and didactic. Too little and well … it is just too little. We are in a film, not waiting for Godot! Atom Egoyan (Exotica, 1994; The Sweet Hereafter, 1997) illustrates how we need to work to get to the essence of visual writing by paring back dialogue to the essentials. In real life we don’t overtalk, or for example, use people’s names in conversation unless we are saying hello or are super angry. In writing dialogue, I try to get at the very essential nature of what it is they are trying to communicate, or not communicate to each other. I strip away every extraneous word; I find when I distil things to that extent, the dialogue becomes extraordinarily concentrated; it becomes very loaded and uncomfortable … I find it really fascinating when the dialogue is so loaded that the viewer will try and negotiate the dialogue’s possible subtextual meaning. (Egoyan 2003, 169)

Kill your darlings! This is one of the most favorite terms used in script editing and fortunately or unfortunately it means just that. You have to kill or eliminate scenes no matter how precious they are to you or how long you have been just dying to include for example Aunt Maude as a character in your script, if she or it does not work or contribute new knowledge or drama to your script exit stage left and right. This is particularly true for dialogue that is “on the nose” (a character saying what we can already see). One of the most important tools you have as you shape your script is to create time to re-read your work. It is a good idea to leave your work for at least a few days once you have written it and have a break. Let the brain refresh and percolate and come back and re-read. It is amazing what will jump out from the page. First you will probably be amazed at the fact you have written this wonderful work—because if you were in flow you may not remember writing it! Second you can usually see what could do with some shaping and sculpting because it just does not work. Here is where your craft knowledge comes in and for me it is the time to think structure and the old adages of drama. Is there enough jeopardy? Is there a midpoint where the character is at the lowest of the low? Is there a climax? Does the character change? What is the theme?—this is often echoed in the first and last scenes that can be a mirror of themselves. You will know what craft skills to apply if you have been continuously open to learning. Trust yourself. Be brave and shape the work to be what you envisioned in the first place.

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Checking in on Metaphor and Meaning In Chap. 6, we talked about the power of metaphor as a way of crystallizing the central essence of your writing, a way of encapsulating what you want to explore. We also talked about how to use metaphor as a sort of litmus test to direct your research or keep your writing on the right track. In that context, we discussed metaphor as something that was like insight, an idea or image that was abstracted during the processes of inspiration or research. While using metaphor is a really great way of bringing your writing to life and making it memorable and unique, thinking about the metaphors you may like to use is quite hard. And they might not come early in the creative process. A word of warning if they do, you have to be careful not to overuse metaphor because this may seem forced or convoluted. But anyway let’s think about metaphor a little more because it can make your writing come alive at the shaping stage and potentially be the solution to problems regarding why a script is not quite working. So, as well as being an inspirational and insight tool, metaphor is also a craft tool. Why is it so hard to think at this abstract level of creating metaphor? As I said before, your brain is really working hard so no wonder you feel tired after a few hours of focused rewriting (and potentially a few walks with the dog and dives into the fridge for chocolate). There is an explanation for this. Yes for the mental fatigue that might make you feel tired and the walk and chocolate that might give you a momentary respite or sugar high. Let’s consider a number of reasons why this is so. In Chap. 6, we discussed neuroscientist Oshin Vartanian’s review of the research around analogy and metaphor. Vartanian found “analogy and metaphor recruit WM, attention, and inhibition resources, which in turn would appear necessary for the sub-­ processes of retrieval (of relevant [sic] information from long term memory), as well as evaluation and abstraction in structural alignment” (Vartanian 2012, 310). While Vartanian’s meta-analysis of the literature set out to find whether—and demonstrated that—analogy and metaphor did activate consistent but dissociable brain regions by investigating MRI studies, he also cited research that emphasizes the fact that creating “metaphoric meaning places greater demands on WM and text comprehension systems than literal meaning” (Vartanian 2012, 312). So to create metaphor Vartanian’s findings that both working memory and long-term memory are having great demands placed on them while at the same time we are evaluating and abstracting to create one of the

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highest levels of creative work we know that we may feel mental fatigue as our brain is doing a lot of work!. There is an added bonus here at the shaping stage in understanding how we think to create metaphor—as using working memory is part of the thinking scenario, it is not too late to do more research if necessary to top up that working memory with useful and exciting information. What Julia Cameron call’s your “Artist’s Well”. What a great metaphor! A deep and endless well of mysterious ideas to use in your writing.

Testing the Emotional Rollercoaster As we check our rough draft, we are thinking about how our work will impact our audience, what screenwriting guru Dona Cooper calls the emotional roller coaster. The structural patterns of the rising three act structure are well entrenched in screenwriting theory so again it is easy to use the story pattern that works best for you. Check that there is enough uncertainty and anticipation at those turning points, or enough woe in the depths at the midpoint low. Enough drama at the climax and resolution at the end. The screenplay is like a piece of music orchestrating the emotions of our audience. But how can we check the orchestration of emotion via the use of metaphor? Once again, we turn to psychology research so that we can understand how we think as we create metaphor and emotion and empower ourselves to do more of what works. Todd Lubart and Isaac Getz in the insightful article, “Emotion, Metaphor, and the Creative Process” (1997), specifically researched the role of emotion and metaphor in the creative process. They found, as we have previously discussed, that the brain is busy coding and recoding the information we are taking in at the behest of the task at hand. I propose that if we use our central and guiding metaphor, this task is made more efficient and focused and ultimately will help us make sure our work is really hitting the mark emotion-wise. It will also help to make sure we are creating work that is driven by the emotions engendered by our own personal voice and thus be potentially more unique and original. Think on it. The information and ideas stored in your memory banks have been processed by you and your emotions. Lubart and Getz found that we all differ in regard to the concepts and images that we store in our memory. While this may or may not seem obvious what is important is that this information is underlined by the findings of a scientific study. What is more important is that individual differences in creativity can arise

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from each aspect of what Lubart and Getz call our “emotional resonance mechanism” or “endocepts” (Lubart and Getz 1997, 292). This is basically the term they give to the way emotions are organized by basic psychological factors that are different and unique for each individual. They note that these: Idiosyncratic emotions, sometimes called affective experiences or feelings, … attached to concepts or images representing objects, people, and events in memory. These emotions are multidimensional, spectrally rich, and often cannot be easily described in terms of socially determined emotional categories (e.g., the social category “love” is often insufficient to describe the psychological richness of an individual’s experience). (Lubart and Getz 1997, 286)

This research enlivens and makes concrete our earlier information about the fact that the brain is coding new information in the formation of ideas. It makes sense here to think about how we can be effective in our rewriting so that we know how to think deeper to find emotion via metaphor. Remember here our thinking is both divergent and convergent as we search for the best edit. As we recall from Chap. 3. on the one hand, thinking involves “divergent-exploratory action, which is expansive by nature, leading to many ideas or paths from an initial starting point” as well as the complementary mode of “convergent-integrative action, in which several elements are brought together in a new whole, a synthetic form of thought and action” (Mastria et al. 2018, 6). If we think about the information going into our creative well, we can be selective with what can potentially be information overload or that feeling of being lost in the trees. Lubart and Getz consider how one comes up with an “insightful metaphor” (Lubart and Getz 1997, 288 check this page). Based on a comprehensive overview of relevant research in their field they found as noted above, that the emotions we have acquired due to our experiences are attached to images and concepts stored in our memory and that these images and concepts are different and unique for all of us. Based on this information we can understand how we can make different and unique metaphors in our work. This makes sense. In their words, “individualized, experientially acquired emotion is a key for finding a metaphorically relevant link between distant concepts or images” by a process called “physiognomic sensitivity, which involves the embeddedness of a perceived object in a

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context of feeling and action[that] leads to a frequent assimilation of two physically distinct objects” which resonates with our experience and is also supported by research around synesthesia and affective meaning in generating metaphor (Lubart and Getz 1997, 288). They use the term “endocept” to describe this notion that we all have “idiosyncratic emotions attached to concepts or images representing objects, people, and events in memory” (Lubart and Getz 1997, 289). Going further, they build on this idea to propose that: an endocept’s activation pattern, when propagated, can lead to the activation of proximate endocepts that are attached to other concepts or images in memory … Resonance detection, when it occurs, allows a link between two concepts (potentially remote in cognitive terms) to be established and furthermore a potentially creative metaphor to be generated. (Lubart and Getz 1997, 291)

I am going to quote in full here what they say as I think it is super important to understand how their explanation of one of the most beautiful and powerful tools of storytelling, metaphor, is generated in our brain. How we explore this then makes sense in the What If? section of this chapter. A resonating endocept and the concept or image to which it is attached become active in working memory when the resonance exceeds the individual’s resonance detection threshold. At this point, the raw materials for a metaphor are present: a target concept and a source concept that is emotionally related to the problem but possibly cognitively distant. Metaphor generation can proceed through the exploration, transformation, and mapping between the two concepts and their domains. We hypothesize that a metaphor formed through this emotion-based process possesses higher creative potential than a metaphor formed through a purely cognitive process because of the individualized nature of endocepts. (Lubart and Getz 1997, 292)

The takeaway for us so elegantly summarized by Lubart and Getz is that generating metaphor is reliant on three main elements in thinking including: “(a) emotion-based endocepts that are attached to specific concepts or images in memory, (b) an automatic resonance mechanism that propagates an active emotional pactem through memory and activates other endocepts and (c) a resonance detection threshold that controls

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whether a resonace-activated endocept/concept enters conscious, working memory” (Lubart and Getz 1997, 288). I have done a lot of research on Gothic Metaphor, and I love to use this in my screenwriting and write about it in the work of others in my academic writing and research (McVeigh 2018, 2020). While the audience might not “get” that Gothic metaphor has been used I have a lot of fun as a writer knowing that I am creating a scenario that will orchestrate their emotions via the use of the elements of the Gothic metaphor. The hit HBO series, Big Little Lies is a case in point. The metaphor of the female Gothic woven into the story underlines the themes and thus subtext of the series about the hidden secrets in each of the key character’s lives. Think the overpowering double framing of the window and the landscape that the Nicole Kidman character is framed in—this suggestion of entrapment that is an element of the metaphor of the female Gothic which is working at a subtextual and unconscious level. Likewise, the use of the metaphor of the figure in the landscape brought to us by artistic and literary traditions that tell us visually so much more about the themes of a painting or story by impacting our unconscious (McVeigh 2020).

Dealing the Cards of the Table Read Once we have shaped and edited our rough first draft to the extent that we are ready to share our script with others, we must remember that we are still in control of this stage of the creative process. There has not been a lot written from the screenwriting perspective about how to deal with what can be the scary table read and what to take away from this for your editing and rewriting but again it is anecdotal research. However, in their article “What Are the Stages of the Creative Process? What Visual Art Students Are Saying” (2018), Marion Botella, Franck Zenasni, and Todd Lubart alert us to research from cognitive psychology that can be helpful as we understand what we may be thinking as we hear the first public reading of our script. Obviously, at the table read stage we are taking a step back from our work to evaluate it as if we were an outsider hearing it read for the first time. In their overview of the relevant research psychology research Botella, Zenasni and Lubart investigate the ideas of judgment, verification, and evaluation as artists evaluate their work. The takeaway they find for us is that we have the power to decide what to accept. No matter what,

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Personal validation consists of appreciating one’s own work … to generate a new creative process. In addition to personal validation, there exists a collective level of validation. The latter deals with the evaluation of a creative production by peers, by an audience or by a critic. Collective validation can only lead to a new process if there is acceptance of the evaluation that has been formulated. (Botella et al. 2018, 11)

So, this is number one thing to remember as you face the table read. You are in control no matter what anyone may say about your work. The observations based on the reading may come from a collective but it will only create better work if it serves you in your evaluation of the work. Not to state the obvious but it will become apparent at the table read where things aren’t working so it will not be too hard to take on board any suggestions that may be worth considering. But number two thing is equally important and while you may not be in control of the scenario (the table read may be organized by your screenwriting teacher or producer), there are proven factors according to the psychology research that will facilitate the best outcome for the screenwriter in the hot seat. The reading and feedback works best if there is a focus and it is fun and flexible. A safe space where screenwriters feel they can take a risk by trying out different scenarios. In their work in educational psychology in “Exploring creative learning in the classroom: A multi-method approach” (2017), Alexandra Gadja, Ron Beghetto, and Maciej Karwowski found “behaviours associated with encouraging creativity in the classroom were associated with students’ positive engagement, self-expression, and ideation” (Gadja et al. 2017, 250). The positive behaviors tabled from this research include those below that while specifically dealing with a school classroom, apply equally to any scenario where a writer is learning their craft. –– establishing improvement-focused goals –– providing opportunities for students to use their imagination while learning –– encouraging students to take sensible risks and act independently –– teaching with a more game-like or playful approach –– providing opportunities for choice and discovery –– encouraging flexible thinking and confidence in student ideas –– treating student questions and idea (especially unusual and unexpected ones) seriously

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–– refraining from premature assessment of student ideas –– demonstrating a belief that teaching should go beyond imparting simplistic and factual knowledge, and –– supporting students when they fail by showing them ways to learn from mistakes. The above behaviors seem obvious when they are collated like this. And I love the fact that we can refer to them here thanks to this research. I hope that in your table reads you can make sure that these are the parameters of you sharing your work, because in the final analysis this scientific research has shown this is how to get the best results when people are learning their craft. It is also a reminder to us of how to give feedback to others during the table read. Now let’s have a go at one of the What If? exercises as you shape and share your work at this stage of the creative process. Again, have fun!

What If? 1. Visual Writing: Haiku and Emotion We have learnt how important emotion is in conjuring that highest level of analytical thinking, metaphor. Metaphor is a powerful tool in underlining the themes of your screenplay but also in creating mood and meaning. It is also a visual shorthand for conjuring so much in just one image in the poetic form of visual writing which is essential to good screenwriting. As the Polish screenwriter, Krzysztof Piesiewicz so tellingly observes, A writer should train to be perceptive and develop the ability to stop and focus on the world around him. … The scriptwriter needs to use words in a way that makes the reader see pictures first, rather than emotions. The words should form sentences, and these sentences should turn into pictures that express emotion. This is the art of scriptwriting. It takes great skill to describe in words the pictures that exemplifiy pain, joy, despair, hopelessness and love. It is difficult but not impossible—you can learn a lot by looking at the paintings of great artists. (Piesiewicz 2003, 131)

The Japanese poetry form of Haiku is a powerful example of visual writing. Choose images from nature that evoke a strong atmosphere and

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feeling. You can start with something simple and relatable like a sunrise or sunset or go for broke and choose a busy street scene. Think about the essence of the scene—usually it is a tone or feeling—loneliness, beauty, anticipation, horror, devastation. To practice capturing the essence of a scene there is no better way than to write Japanese Haiku, which is an unrhymed poetic form consisting of 17 syllables arranged in three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables respectively. There are lots of great examples on the Internet. When you start to write your big print think in Haiku mode. 2. Upping the BIG PRINT No description includes every detail. It is important to just get the essence of a scene, which is really set by the tone you want to create. A good way to do this is to practice writing the big print for an ordinary scene—maybe your screenwriting classroom or your bedroom and think about which two or three key characters are in the scene—and write it from the point of view of different genres—horror, sci fi, thriller, romance. Or write the scene as an establishing scene with no dialogue. Or reverse engineer a scene that is really powerful. Write your version and then find the script and compare. Or view key scenes from some of the greats writer/ directors or filmmakers whose work you love. The great Swedish filmmaker, Ingmar Bergman was a master at setting up scenes with only silence. Watch the opening take of Cries and Whispers where there is not a word said for almost 15 minutes and then write the big print and see what happens. Conversely, watch the long travelling take of Jean Luc Godard’s Le Weekend with a couple of friends and write what you see! It is pretty full on! Compare what you have written and see who best captures what you believe Godard is exploring in this film. 3. Table Read I have been involved in many readings of scripts. Basically, the first time the screenwriter will have the opportunity for others who are not necessarily their family or friends to read the script. It’s great if professional or student actors can be the reader but in the first instance a reader who is not trying to be an actor is a great start. So as not to be too overwhelming it is a good idea to start the reading by having the writer select a particular scene they want to hear read aloud. Then give a draft of this scene to people who are going to be the readers, each person in the reading to read

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a character and one person to read the scene headings and big print. It is also really important to establish protocols about giving and receiving feedback. As the writer you should be in control, or in control with your screenwriting teacher. It is for you to listen to the reading and identify things that don’t work. Things like boring bits or plot points that come out of nowhere, extraneous characters or the most common, a lack of jeopardy or tension to impel you to want to find out what comes next. As you listen to your script being read aloud make sure you have a copy of the script and a pen to mark up any areas you want to edit and shape and potentially seek feedback. To get more out of your table read you can direct the reading and ask those reading to act out a couple of scenes using the Judith Weston approach we discussed above. Keep the given circumstances of the scene but change the intention of the character going into the scene, which as we saw changed the subtext. You may find that if you change the intention you may want to rewrite the scene in a more visual and subtextual manner based on what you discover as you improvise.

References Botella, Marion, Vlad Glaveanu, Frank Zenasni, M.  Storme, N.  Myszkowski, M. Wolff, and Todd Lubart. 2013. How Artists Create: Creative Process and Multivariate Factors. Learning and Individual Differences 26: 161–170. Botella, Marion, Franck Zenasni, and Todd Lubart. 2018. What Are the Stages of the Creative Process? What Visual Art Students Are Saying. Frontiers in Psychology 21 (Nov.). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02266. Bourgeois-Bougrine, Samira, Vlad Glaveanu, Marion Botella, K. Guillou, P.M. de Biasi, and Todd Lubart. 2014. The Creativity Maze: Exploring Creativity in Screenplay Writing. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 8 (4): 384–399. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0037839. Cooper, Dona. 1997. Writing Great Screenplays for Film and TV. New  York: Macmillan. Egoyan, Atom. 2003. Screencraft: Screenwriting. Edited by Declan McGrath and Felim Mac Dermott, pp. 164–174. Switzerland: Rotovision SA. Eliot, T.S. 1915. The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock. Accessed May 2, 2023. @ https://www.poetr yfoundation.org/poetr ymagazine/poems/44212/ the-­love-­song-­of-­j-­alfred-­prufrock. Gadja, Aleksandra, Ronald A. Beghetto, and Maciej Karwowski. 2017. Exploring Creative Learning in the Classroom: A Multi-method Approach. Thinking Skills and Creativity 24: 250–267.

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Glaveanu, Vlad, Todd Lubart, Nathalie Bonnardel, Marion Botella, Pierre-Marc de Biaisi, Myriam Desainte-Catherine, Asta Georgsdottir, Katell Guillou, Gyorgy Kurtag, Christophe Mouchiroud, Martin Storme, Alicja Wojtczuk, and Franck Zenasni. 2013. Creativity as Action: Findings from Five Creative Domains. Frontiers in Psychology 4 (April): Article 176. Lin, Hause, and Oshin Vartanian. 2018. A Neuroeconomic Framework for Creative Cognition. Perspectives on Psychological Science 13 (6): 655–677. Lubart, T., and I. Isaac Getz. 1997. Emotion, Metaphor, and the Creative Process. Creativity Research Journal 10 (4): 285–230. Mastria, Serena; Agnoli, Sergio; Zanon, Marco; Lubart, Todd and Corazza, Giovanni Emanuele. 2018. “Creative Brain, Creative Mind, Creative Person” in Zoi Kapoula et al. (eds.), Exploring Transdisciplinarity in Art and Sciences, Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature https://doi. org/10.1007/978-3-319-76054-4_1 McVeigh, Margaret. 2018. Different But the Same: Landscape and the Gothic as Transnational Story Space in Jane Campion’s Sweetie (1989) and Lucrecia Martel’s La Ciénaga (2001). In Critical Arts: North- North Cultural and Media Studies, Volume 31, 2017—Issue 5: Cinema at the End of the World. Taylor & Francis. McVeigh, M. 2020. Telling Big Little Lies: Screenwriting and the Creation of the Female Gothic as Extended Metaphor in Complex Television. The Journal of Screenwriting 11 (1, April), (Intellect). Piesiewicz, Krzysztof. 2003. In Screencraft: Screenwriting, ed. Declan McGrath and Felim MacDermott, 126–138. Switzerland: Rotovision. Redvall, Eva Novrup. 2009. Scriptwriting as a Creative, Collaborative Learning Process of Problem Finding and Problem Solving. MedieKultur: Journal of Media and Communication Research 25 (46): 34–55. Runco, M.A. 2010. Education Based on a Parsinomious Theory of Creativity. In Nurturing Creativity in the Classroom, ed. R.A. Beghetto and J.C. Kaufman, 235–251. Cambridge University Press. Seger, Linda. 1999. Making a Good Writer Great. A Creativity Workbook for Screenwriters. Los Angeles: Silman-James Press. Towne, Robert. 2003. In Screencraft: Screenwriting, ed. Declan McGrath and Felim Mac Dermott, 138–152. Switzerland: Rotovision SA. Vartanian, Oshin. 2012. Dissociable Neural Systems for Analogy and Metaphor: Implications for the Neuroscience of Creativity. British Journal of Psychology 103: 302–316. Weston, Judith. 1999. Directing Actors. Michael Wiese Productions.

CHAPTER 9

A Creative Thinking and Writing Tool. The Creativity Metacognitive Framework

Abstract  This chapter presents and consolidates the work of this book in a framework, the Creative Metacognitive Framework (McVeigh 2020, 2023) that creatives may use to scaffold their thinking about creativity and the creative process during screenwriting. It is a tool that can be used by teachers and students of screenwriting alike to consider the phases of the creative process of screenwriting under the multivariate factors of cognition, conation, emotion, and environment proposed by Lubart et  al. in their Multivariate Model. The Creative Metacognitive Framework presented in the chapter illustrates factors impacting thinking and writing using  the Inspiration and Envisioning stage of the creative process of screenwriting as an examplar. It applies findings from screenwriting as a creative practice, cognitive psychology, and cognitive  neuroscience discussed in the book in a table that references the research, exercises, and screenwriting theory presented in this book, Screenwriting from the Inside Out: Think and Write Like a Creative. The work of the chapter is encapsulated under the framework heading “Work in Progress” which crystallizes the relevant stage of thinking and writing like a creative. The “Creative

Work in Progress Creative Process Stage: Creativity Metacognitive Framework (McVeigh 2020, McVeigh in McVeigh et al. 2023, 5) Craft Stage: Screenwriting © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. McVeigh, Screenwriting from the Inside Out, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40520-4_9

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Process Stage” explores key creativity theory and the “Craft Stage” backgrounds key screenwriting theory. The “What If?” section of the chapter is a concluding coda which describes how the framework can be used to scaffold thinking and writing like a creative. Keywords  Screenwriting • Creativity • Creative process • Creativity Metacognitive Framework • Metacognition

To break free from traditional ways of thinking and labeling, one must ‘bombard the brain with new experiences’, which forces a reevaluation of existing categories and a creation of new connections. Changing perception is critical for the generative stage of creativity, when the artist is seeking out new ideas. (Kaufman and Gregoire, Wired to Create 2016, 183).

Creative Metacognition The premise of this book is to align research into creativity, which is so beautifully and thoroughly researched in cognitive psychology and neuroscience to relevant findings to screenwriting as creative practice. While it is unlikely we will ever unlock the secrets of the brain as we make creative decisions, the work covered in the chapters of this book is a start to knowing how we think, so that we can think and write better. The term that describes “thinking about how we think” is “metacognition”. In the fascinating article, “In Praise of Clark Kent: Creative Metacognition and the Importance of Teaching Kids When (Not) to Be Creative”, cognitive psychologists James C. Kaufman and Ron Beghetto propose and coin the construct of CMC (Creative Metacognition) as being “a combination of self-knowledge (knowing one’s own creative strengths and limitations) and contextual knowledge (knowing when, where, how and why to be creative)” (2013, 155). As Kaufman and Beghetto so beautifully say, Creative Metacognition is a form of: Cognition that helps people monitor and develop their creative competence … Specifically CMC includes the combination of knowledge about specific content and tasks that will help inform when, where, and why it

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might be beneficial to be creative; knowledge of strategies for how to be creative in particular domains and contexts; and knowledge about oneself (in order to recognize one’s creative strengths and identify areas in need of further development). Further CMC would also encompass traits associated with metacognition such as self-reflection, self-regulation, and self-monitoring. (Kaufman and Beghetto 2013, 160)

The topics of self-reflection, self-regulation, and self-monitoring form part of a corpus of ongoing research in cognitive psychology. In aligning screenwriting as creative process and cognitive psychology for example, myself and my fellow authors, Andreia Valquaresma and Maciej Karwowski (2023) have researched the processes of creative self-regulation during screenwriting to demonstrate an increase in creativity facilitated by screenwriting students’ awareness of their creative process. You don’t have to be super smart to be more creative. Even though in this book we discussed some pretty intense research from psychology and neuroscience I trust you can understand how it can relate to us as screenwriters so that we can be more creative.

Thinking and Writing Like a Creative There are some common misconceptions about creativity. Like it is a process over which we have no control. Like we are either born “creative” or we are not. No so. As I trust you have learnt in this book, armed with insights about how we think during the creative process of screenwriting, and indeed any discipline, we can all work to enhance our work to become more original and creative—work that is a gift to ourselves and to others. To help you conceptualise and apply all the work of this book in the next section I have tabulated research and practice in screenwriting and creativity as it relates to the first stage of the creative process into what I term “The Creative Metacognitive Framework” at the  Inspiration and Insight stage of the creative process of screenwriting discussed in this book. A similar framework can be developed for each of the other iterative but interconnected stages investigated in the book: Research and Insight, Writing and Flow and Shaping and Sharing.

What If? The Creative Metacognitive Framework (McVeigh 2020: McVeigh in McVeigh et al. 2023, 5).

Bourgeois-Bougrine, Glaveanu et al. (2014, 2018) Stages of Creative Process in Screenwriting Mastria, Agnoli, Zanon, Lubart, and Carozza (2018) Multivariate approach and neuroscience Divergent Thinking/ Convergent Thinking Working memory Ideas generation Constant cycle of generation and evaluation of ideas

Mulivariate Creativity Sternberg and Lubart (1995), Sternberg (2005), Lubart et al. (2015)

Cognition

Screenwriting/ Psychology

Creativity theory scaffold

Benedek (2018) Neuroscience of Creative Idea Generation Agnoli et al. (2018) Mindfulness Corozza (2016) Dynamic Universal Creativity Process Gabora and Apara (2013) Insight

Botella, Glaveanu et al. (2013) How artists create: Creative Process and Mulitvariate Factors Vartanian (2012, 2016) Analogy and Metaphor, Fostering Creativity: Insights from Neuroscience

Cognitive psychology/ Neuroscience theorists

Brainstorming Concept Mapping Automatic Writing Drama Games, random images, chance event

The Creative Process (Lubart et al. 2015) McVeigh (2020, McVeigh et al. 2023)

Screenwriting craft exercise

The Screen Idea

Idea generation Stream of consciousness writing (In character)

Script First Draft Development Screenplay (Batty et al. 2017) Concept Docs, Treatment, Scene Breakdown, First Draft

Creativity Screenwriting pedagogy/Creativity theory/Film exercises theory

Table 9.1  Creativity Metacognitive Framework (McVeigh 2020; McVeigh in McVeigh et al. 2023, 5)

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Personality Traits (risk taking, tolerance for ambiguity, etc.) Motivation to create (intrinsic motivation, need for achievement, curiosity drive) Personality Traits (risk taking, tolerance for ambiguity, etc.) Motivation to create (e.g., intrinsic motivation, need for achievement, curiosity drive) Stimulating physical world and social context Cultural Creativity Glaveanu (2016) Agnoli et al. Corazza, Agnoli, Martello (2016)

Motivation, Emotion Luria and Kaufman (2017) Karwowski and Lebuda (2016) CPI, CSE, CSR Creative Personal Identity Self-regulation

Ivcevic Pringle and Hoffman (2019) Lubart and Getz (1997)

Developed from McVeigh (2020) in McVeigh et al. (2023, 5)

Inspiration and Envisioning (McVeigh 2023)

Environment

Emotion

Conotion

Immersion in potential film references, inspirations. Inspirational quotes

Diary and Journal of images/ Mood board Metaphor

Convergent thinking Metaphor, Emotion

Exemplar films Film Theory Inspiring quotes and interviews with screenwriters

Deconstruction Viewings & collaborative discussions Inspiration

Drama and Story Haiku poetry Structure writing (feelings Truth senses metaphor) Treasured item from childhood

Cooper (1997) Writing and Dramatic Centre. rewriting “The Universal Story Story of My Life” 9  A CREATIVE THINKING AND WRITING TOOL. THE CREATIVITY… 

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The Creative Metacognitive Framework in Table  9.1 is for the Inspiration and Envisioning stage of the Creative Process. It can be read using the variables impacting creativity and the creative process as conceptualized in the Multivariate Model (Sternberg and Lubart 1995; Sternberg 2005; Lubart et al. 2015) to provide a context for talking about the many variables that are integral to, and impact upon, the way a creative person thinks. To read the table we start with the factors impacting creativity and creative thinking as theorised in The Multivariate Model. These include the factors of cognition, conotion, emotion, and environment (Lubart et al. 2015). These form the first column of the table and anchor the theories we have discussed in this book. Starting with each variable and reading across the relevant row, you will see a discrete cell that is informed by the academic field at the top of the relevant column and includes theories relevant to understanding what is going on as we think at the Inspiration and Envisioning stage. As well you will find tabulated the research investigating the ways in which researchers assessed the effectiveness of experiments designed to advance knowledge in creativity research. You will also find the “What If?” exercises from each chapter tabled as they are relevant to developing a particular aspect of your thinking and creativity. The headings used in this framework may also be used to collate craft and creativity findings discussed for each stage of the creative process of screenwriting.  In later research I intend to develop and publish re the Creative Metacognitive Framework at each of the stages of the creative process I have presented in this book—Research and Insight, Writing and Flow, and Shaping and Sharing (McVeigh 2020).

References Agnoli, S., Vanucci, C. P., Pelagatti, C., and Corazza, G. E. 2018. Exploring the Link Between Mind Wandering, Mindfulness, and Creativity: A Multidimensional Approach. Creativity Research Journal 30 (1), 41–53. Batty, Craig, Taylor, Staci, Sawtell, Louise, and Conor, Bridget. 2017. Script Development: Defining the Field. Journal of Screenwriting 8 (3): 225–47. Benedek, Mathias. 2018. The Neuroscience of Creative Idea Generation. In Exploring Transdisciplinary in Art and Sciences, eds. Z. Kapoula, E., Volle, J., Renoult, and M. Andreatta, 31–48. Springer. Botella, Marion, Glaveanu, Vlad, Zenasni, Franck, Storme, Martin, Myszkowski, Nils, Wolff, Marion, and Lubart, Todd. 2013. How Artists Create: Creative

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Process and Multivariate Factors. Learning and Individual Differences 26: 161–170. Bourgeois–Bougrine, Samira, and Vlad P. Glăveanu. 2018. Collaborative Screenwriting: Social Factors and Psychological Factors. In The Creative Process: Perspectives from Multiple Domains, ed. Todd Lubart. Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture. Bourgeois-Bougrine, Samira, Vlad Glaveanu, Marion Botella, K. Guillou, P. M. de Biasi, and Todd Lubart. 2014. The Creativity Maze: Exploring Creativity in Screenplay Writing. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 8 (4): 384–399. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0037839 Cooper, Dona. 1997. Writing Great Screenplays for Film and TV. New York: Macmillan. Corazza, Giovanni. E. 2016. Potential Originality and Effectiveness: The Dynamic Definition of Creativity. Creativity Research Journal 28 (3): 258–267. https:// doi.org/10.1080/10400419.2016.1195627 Corazza, Giovanni. E., Agnoli, Sergio, & Martello, S. 2016. A Creativity and Innovation Course for Engineers (pp.  74–93). https://doi.org/10.4018/ 978-1-5225-0643-0.ch004 Gabora, Liane, and Apara Ranjan. 2013. How Insight Emerges in a Distributed Content Addressable Memory. In Neuroscience of Creativity, eds. Oshin Vartanian, A.S. Bristol, and C. Kaufman, 19–43. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Glăveanu, Vlad. P. 2016. The Psychology of Creating: A Cultural-Developmental Approach to Key Dichotomies Within Creativity Studies. In The Palgrave Handbook of Creativity and Culture Research, ed. V.  P. Glăveanu 205–223. Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46344-9_10 Ivcevic Pringle, Zorana, and Hoffman, Jessica. 2019. Emotions and Creativity: From Process to Person to Product. In The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity, eds. James, C.  Kaufman and J.  Sternberg Robert, 273–295. Cambridge University Press. Karwowski, Maciej, and Lebuda, I. 2016. The Big Five, the Huge Two, and Creative Self-Beliefs: A Meta-Analysis. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts 10 (2): 214–232. Kaufman, James C., and Ronald A.  Beghetto. 2013. In Praise of Clark Kent: Creative Metacognition and the Importance of Teaching Kids When (Not) to Be Creative. Roeper Review 35: 155–165. Kaufman, Scott Barry, and Carolyn Gregoire. 2016. Wired to Create. New York: TarcherPerigee, Imprint of Penguin Random House. Lubart, T., and Isaac Getz, I. 1997. Emotion, Metaphor, and the Creative Process. Creativity Research Journal 10: (4): 285–30. Lubart, Todd, C. Mouchiroud, S. Tordjman, and F. Zenasni. 2015. Psychologie de la créativité (Psychology of Creativity). 2nd ed. Paris: Colin.

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Luria, Sarah R., and Kaufman, James C. 2017. The Dynamic Force Before Intrinsic Motivation: Exploring Creative Needs. In The Creative Self, eds. M. Karwowski, and J. C. Kaufman, 317–325. Cambridge: Academic Press. Mastria, Serena, Agnoli, Sergio, Zanon, Marco, Lubart, Todd, and Corazza, Giovanni Emanuele. 2018. Creative Brain, Creative Mind, Creative Person. In Exploring Transdisciplinarity in Art and Sciences, eds. Kapoula Zoi et  al. Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-3-319-76054-4_1 McVeigh, Margaret. 2020. Creativity and Creative Practice: Towards A MetaCognitive Domain Specific Framework for Writing and Making for the Screen. MIC Conference, Marconi Institute of Creativity, Bologna Italy, 14–19 Sept 2020. Unpublished conference paper. McVeigh, Margaret, Andreia Valquaresma, and Maciej Karwowski. 2023. Fostering Creative Agency through Screenwriting: An Intervention. Creativity Research Journal. https://doi.org/10.1080/10400419.2023.2168341. Sternberg, Robert J. 2005. Creativity or Creativities? International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 63 (4): 370–382. Sternberg, Robert J., and Todd Lubart. 1995. Defying the Crowd. New  York: Free Press. Vartanian, O. 2012. Dissociable neural systems for analogy and metaphor: Implications for the neuroscience of Creativity. British Journal of Psychology 103: 302–316. Vartanian, Oshin. 2013. Fostering Creativity: Insights from Neuroscience. In Neuroscience of Creativity, eds. Oshin Vartanian, A. S. Bristol, and C. Kaufman, 257–273. Cambridge, Massachusetts. The MIT Press.

CHAPTER 10

Living a Creative Life. Be Bold!

Abstract  This chapter brings together and applies the work of the previous chapters in Screenwriting from the Inside Out: Think and Write Like a Creative, by focusing on the concept of Creative Metacognition (CMC) as theorized in the field of cognitive psychology, so that writers can think about how they think as they write and become more creative writers in their screenwriting journey. As a conclusion to the work of this book, it offers findings from key creativity researcher Paul E.  Torrance from his book, Manifesto (2002) where he correlated over 40 years of longitudinal studies of creativity and the creative personality. The work of the chapter is encapsulated under the framework heading “Work in Progress” which crystallizes the relevant stage of thinking and writing like a creative. The “Creative Process Stage” explores key creativity theory and the “Craft Stage” backgrounds key screenwriting theory. The chapter reminds us of the pivotal aspects of the creative personality as they seek to live a creative life. In one idea. Be bold! Keywords  Screenwriting • Creativity • Creative process • Everyday creativity

Work in Progress Creative Process Stage: Living a Creative Life Craft stage: Thinking and Writing from the Inside Out! © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. McVeigh, Screenwriting from the Inside Out, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40520-4_10

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One of the most powerful wellsprings of creative energy, outstanding accomplishment, and self-fulfillment seems to be falling in love with something—your dream, your image of the future. (E.  Paul Torrance in Kaufman and Gregoire 2016, 14)

Living a Creative Life I believe the most important thing to remember is that writing should be fun. You should feel a passion for what you are doing. If you are not passionate about what you write how can you expect your audience to be? I will never forget the student story I read that was a testament to this. This student really, really wanted to explore a deeply personal story but they were not quite ready. They had hinted about what they wanted to write when we discussed ideas in class but when it came time to submit the outline the initial story was nowhere to be seen. What was submitted instead was a chronological outline of getting up and coming to uni that day. Nothing else. No passion. No insight. Needless to say, the student created no emotion in this recount, but after some work the story she wanted to tell was told and it was beautiful. It just took her the confidence to marshal all those aspects of the creative personality and the knowledge of her creative process that we have been discussing in this book including, openness, risk taking, independent thinking and the trust in her own unique voice. There is a fallacy that we must be the tortured artist to write something worthwhile; we just have to write what we know—what we know we want to find out about or what we know to be true by tapping into our passions and curiosity.

Breaking the Rules So, even before you read this book you most likely knew all the basic rules of telling stories for the screen. To start there’s the three-act structure and Aristotle and the French New Wave filmmaker, Jean-Luc Godard’s famous saying that for a story, all you need is a beginning and a middle and an end—but not necessarily in that order. Godard who always sought to be different and unique also said all you need for a story is a girl and a gun. This book has not been about that! But it has been about being different and unique.

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By now you also know that telling visual stories is very different from telling text-based stories. Too many words can get in the way because the story is also conveyed by other elements—cinematography, mise-en-scène, editing, and sound. Visual and emotional elements like metaphor and tone are the heart of your story. So, if we know all the above about the craft of screenwriting, why would we want to break the rules (from time to time) or make our own rules? Everyone says there are no rules if you are breaking the rules. But the truth is there has to be some way of organizing a story that will unfold in chronological time. And the other truth we have discussed in this book is that there are attributes of the creative personality and creative thinking as well as being a “creative” that you can channel as you write. Again, I turn to my favorite book about screenwriting, Declan McGrath and Felim McDermott’s 2003, book, Screencraft: Screenwriting. The last thoughts I want to share with you from this book are from the interview with Kaneto Shindo who says, Every aspiring writer needs to gain experience, and experience comes from effort. Through effort you improve ability. The thoughts and ideas in our minds are without structure, and in order to give them structure we need skill. To get skill you have to study. Study, study and study … What you do not know treat as a challenge … and you try different ways and experiment. Your talent will not blossom unless you learn how to recover from your downfalls. (Shindo in McGrath and MacDermott 2003, 99)

So have a go. Listen to the words of wise writers like Kinto Shindo and treat new knowledge as a challenge and a joy. Experiment if you want to blossom! Try to be creative every day. Even if you are not writing, creativity researchers have found that doing something different every day—like taking a different route to work—can enhance creativity! (Karwowski et al. 2017)

Be Bold! I want to finish this book with findings that I always share with my screenwriting students at the end of a screenwriting course and creativity workshop. Again findings that are rock solid in their veracity. In his book Manifesto (2002) key creativity researcher Paul E. Torrance correlated longitudinal studies of creativity and the creative personality.

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In Chap. 7, “Expectations and Playing Your Own Game”, Torrance outlines findings by Shekerjian (1990) based on her investigations into the attributes of 40 prestigious US MacArthur Fellows (who received this fellowship as extraordinarily talented and creative individuals) that align with Torrance’s own findings based on his study of the achievement of creative adults. These recommendations for success as a creative personality are outlined below and are regarded by Torrance as the pivotal aspects of success for the creative personality: . Find your talent. 1 2. Commit to it and make it shine. 3. Don’t be afraid to risk. Even failure, which, if seen in its proper light, brings insight and opportunity. 4. Find courage by looking to something stronger and better than your puny, vulnerable self. 5. No lusting after quick solutions. Relax, stay loose. 6. Get to know yourself, understand your needs and the specific conditions you favour. 7. Respect your culture. 8. Then, finally break free from the seductive pull of book learning and research and the million other preparatory steps that could delay for the entire span of a life and immerse yourself in the doing. (Shekerjian 1990 in Torrance 2002, 58) What more can I say? My every best wish for your writing and thinking from the inside out!

References Karwowski, M., I.  Lebuda, G.  Szumski, and A.  Firkowska-Mankiewicz. 2017. From Moment-to-moment to Day-to-day: Experience Sampling and Diary Investigations in Adults’ Everyday Creativity. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 11 (3): 309–324. https://doi.org/10.1037/aca0000127. Kaufman, Scott Barry, and Gregoire, Carolyn. 2016. Wired to Create. NY: TarcherPerigee, Imprint of Penguin Random House. Shindo, Kaneto. 2003. In Screencraft: Screenwriting, ed. Declan McGrath and Felim Mac Dermott, 90–100. Switzerland: Rotovision SA. Torrance, E. Paul. 2002. The Manifesto: A Guide to Developing a Creative Career. Westport US: Greenwood Press.

Index

A Agnoli, Sergio, 26, 40, 70, 89–93, 107, 109–111, 143–147 Alternate Uses Task (AUT), 48 Amabile, Teresa, 41 Aristotle, 7, 15, 17, 18, 22 Aronson, Linda, 14, 17, 20 Artistic identity, 56–58, 62, 65 Artist’s date, 33 The Artist’s Way, 70 Associative thinking, 44–46 Automatic writing, 39 Autonomy, 155, 156, 164 B Batty, Craig, 19–21, 24, 25, 28 Beghetto, Ronald A., 63, 155, 173, 180, 181 Benedek, Mathias, 47–50 Big C creativity, 59 The Big Five, 59–61, 66 Big print, 160, 166, 175, 176 Biograhia Literaria, 22

Bonnardel, Nathalie, 29–31, 161, 162 Bordwell, David, 97 Botella, Marion, 127, 128, 130, 132–142, 29, 60, 60, 66, 67, 79, 84, 161, 162, 163, 172, 172, 173 Bourgeois-Bougrine, Samira, 26, 28, 29, 79–83, 85–87, 90, 93, 94, 127–130, 132–143, 145, 160, 161, 164, 165 Brainstorming, 39, 48, 52 Buñuel, Luis, 97 Bush, Vannevar, 42, 43 C Cameron, Julia, 23, 24, 32, 33, 58, 70, 169 Catching the Big Fish, 38 Chance, 148, 149 Character back story, 119 Cognition, 180, 184 Cognitive psychology, 39–41, 44, 46, 50, 51 Coleridge, William, 22

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. McVeigh, Screenwriting from the Inside Out, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40520-4

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Conor, Bridget, 19 Conotion, 184 Convergent thinking, 43, 47, 51–53 Cooper, Dona, 14, 17, 18, 112, 114, 169 Coppola, Francis Ford, 101 Corazza, Giovanni Emanuele, 26, 40, 41, 70, 89–93, 107, 109–111, 143 Courage, 155, 156 Creative cognition, 46–49, 106 Creative Filmmaking from the Inside Out: Five Keys to the Art of Making Inspired Movies and Television, 71 Creative metacognition (CMC), 63 Creative Metacognitive Framework, 42, 63, 146, 180–182 Creative personal identity, 56–73 The Creative Process: Perspectives from Multiple Domains, 81 Creative self beliefs, 62 Creative self concept, 62 Creative self-efficacy (CSE), 62 Creative self-regulation, 181 Creativity (definition of), 16, 17 Creativity Coach, 39, 42, 126, 143 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 22, 23, 28, 29, 126, 137 D D’Amico, Suso, 57 Dali, Salvador, 97 Dannenbaum, Jed, 71 Dark Paradise, 78 Davies, Rosamund, 119 Daydreaming, 80, 81, 86–87 Default-mode network (DMN), 158 Dehaene, Stanislas, 93, 94 Deren, Maya, 97

Dialogue, 160, 161, 165–167, 175 Divergent thinking, 41, 43, 47, 48, 51–53 Dramatic centre, 111–114, 116–119 Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, 72, 91 Dreaming, 80, 86–87, 90 Dream journal, 97 E Editing, 158, 159, 161, 162, 167, 172 Edwards, Dr Betty, 23, 72, 73, 91 Egoyan, Atom, 167 Electron encephalography (EEG), 46, 47 Eliot, T.S., 154 Emotion, 41, 51, 61, 66–70, 72, 82, 165, 169–172, 174–175, 184 Eureka moment, 78, 89 Every day creativity, 189 Executive attention network, 129 Executive control network, 46, 158, 159 Exploring Transdisciplinarity in Art and Sciences, 88 Extrinsic motivation, 41, 63, 64 F Family story, 104, 106, 116, 119 Field, Syd, 14, 20 First draft, 124, 126, 131, 137, 148, 154–156, 162 Florida, Richard, 23 Flow, 124–149 Found poetry, 96 Froug, William, 13 Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), 47

 INDEX 

G Gabora, Liane, 94 Gadja, Aleksandra, 173 Gardiner, Paul, 53 Getz, Issac, 169–172 Glăveanu, Vlad, 5, 26, 28–31, 60, 67, 83, 87, 143, 161, 162 Godard, Jean-Luc, 175 Gregoire, Carolyn, 104, 105, 108, 128, 129, 180 Grenville, Kate, 120 Grit, 137–140 H Haiku, 174–175 Hayes 10-Year Rule, 5 Hoag,Tami, 78 Hoffman, Jessica, 68–70 The Huge Two, 59–61 I Idea generation, 44, 47, 53 Ideas, 100, 101, 103–114, 116–120 Imagination, 128, 129, 138 Immersion, 126, 130, 138 Independent thinking, 55 Insight, 39, 47, 51, 78, 83, 89, 90, 94, 95, 100–120 Inspiration, 39, 51, 53 Inspiration and Envisioning, 7, 8, 78–97 “In the zone,” 128–130, 132, 135, 140, 143, 146 Intrinsic motivation, 41, 63–66 Intuitive thinking, 45 Ivcevic Pringle, Zorana, 68

193

J Janz, Philip, 147 Journal of Screenwriting, 20 Joyce, James, 53 K Kallas, Christina, 18 Kapoula, Zoe, 42, 43, 46–48, 70, 88 Karwowski, Maciej, 41, 60, 62, 63, 144, 173, 181, 189 Kaufman, James C., 62–66, 180, 181 Kaufman, Scott Barry, 104, 105, 108, 128, 129, 180 King, Stephen, 86 L Lamont, Anne, 135 Lebuda, Izabela, 41, 60, 144 Left brain, 18, 23, 91–93 Lightbulb moment, 78–97, 113–118 Limbic system, 111 Lin, Hause, 50, 157–159 Lost Highway, 78 “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock,” 154 Lubart, Todd, 26, 27, 29, 40, 41, 44, 45, 60, 61, 64, 79, 81, 84, 115, 127, 128, 130, 132–142, 161, 162, 169–172, 184 Luria, Sarah R., 64–66 Lynch, David, 38, 56, 78, 97, 100, 102, 112, 124, 125, 129 M MacDermott, Felim, 13, 57, 65, 111–114, 125, 129, 139, 156, 189 Macdonald, Ian. W, 39

194 

INDEX

Manchevski, Milcho, 113 The Manifesto: A guide to developing a creative career, 189 Marconi Institute of Creativity, 40 Mastria, Serena, 26, 40–43, 46–48, 50, 70, 88–93, 106, 107, 109–111 Mayer, Doe, 71 McGrath, Declan, 13, 57, 65, 111–114, 125, 129, 139, 156, 189 McKee, Robert, 14, 16, 17, 20 McVeigh, Margaret, 7, 15, 27, 28, 31, 39, 42, 51, 113, 114, 119, 146, 172, 181–184 Meditation, 126, 141–147 Memory, 39, 48–50, 52 episodic memory, 88, 94 long-term memory, 105, 107, 115–117, 119 procedural memory, 94 semantic memory, 88, 94 working memory, 88–90, 93, 94, 107, 110, 115, 117 Meshes of the Afternoon, 97 Metacognition, 180–181 Metaphor, 113–119, 156, 161, 165, 168–172, 174 Mikkelsen, Thea, 105 Millard, Kathryn, 20 Mindfulness (MF), 39, 141–147 Mind mapping, 52–53 Mind-wandering, 39, 48, 80, 86, 87, 143–146 Morning Pages, 32 Motivation, 41, 50, 51, 84 Multivariate Model, 41–44, 46, 184 Myth, 119

Neuroscience, 39, 40, 45–47, 49–51 Neuroscience of Creativity, 50

N Narration and The Fiction Film, 97 Nash, Margot, 20

S Sawtell, Louise, 19 Sawyer, Keith, 60

O One liner, 112 Openness, 60–62, 68, 155, 156 Openness to experience, 62, 68 Outline, 132, 133 P Paris, Anne, 27, 31 Personality, 41, 42, 45, 51 Piesiewicz, Krzysztof, 65, 96, 113, 125, 139, 174 Poetics, 7, 15, 17 Price, Steven, 19 Procrastinate, 124, 136 Q Queensland Brain Institute, 111 R Rabiger, Michael, 57, 58 Ranjan, Apara, 94 Research, 100–120 Research and insight, 7, 8, 100–120 Right brain, 18, 91–93, 96 Risk-taking, 61, 72–73, 155, 156 Ritual, 85–86 A Room of One’s Own, 19, 83–85 Rough first draft, 124, 131, 136 Runco, Mark. A., 26, 155, 164 Russo, Paolo, 119

 INDEX 

Schiavio, Andrea, 47–50 Schrader, Paul, 114, 116 Screen Australia, 21 Screencraft: Screenwriting, 189 Screen idea, 12, 14, 16–18, 20, 23, 25 Screenwriting 101, 14 Script doctor, 163–165 Selective combination, 90 Selective comparison, 90 Selective encoding, 90 Shaping and Sharing, 7, 8, 154–176 Sheridan, Jim, 111, 125, 126 Shindo, Kaneto, 13, 56, 57, 189 “Show don’t tell,” 160 Sternberg, Robert, 60 Sternberg, Robert. J., 26, 41, 184 Stream-of-consciousness, 53 Structure, 125, 126, 130–134, 136, 138, 148–149 Synder, Blake, 14 Synopsis, 100, 126, 132, 133, 135, 139 T Table read, 157, 172–176 Taxi Driver, 114, 116 Taylor, Staci, 19 Theme, 112–114, 118–120 Three Act Structure, 126, 131 Tolerance, 155, 156 Tolerance of ambiguity, 60, 61, 68, 77 Torrance, E. Paul., 188–190 To the Lighthouse, 12, 83, 84 Towne, Robert, 129, 166

195

Treatment, 126, 132, 133, 136 Truth and Fiction: Notes on (Exceptional) Faith in Art, 113 U Ulysses, 53 Un Chien Andalou, 97 V Valquaresma, Andreia, 42, 51, 181 Vartanian, Oshin, 50, 94, 115, 116, 157–159, 168 W Waldeback, Zara, 24–25 Wallas, Graham, 27, 28 Ward, Thomas, 106, 115 Weston, Judith, 166, 176 Wired to Create, 104, 108, 128, 180 Woolf, Virginia, 19, 83, 84 Working title, 100 Writing and Flow, 7, 8, 124–149 The Writing Book: A Workbook for Fiction Writers, 120 Z Zaillian, Steven, 13, 112 Zanon, Marco, 70, 89–93, 107, 109–111 Zenasni, Franck, 44, 45, 60, 61, 64, 161, 162, 172