Screenwriting: Festive brainstormng

The other week I was round my mum and dad’s and we ended up watching one of those Channel 5 Sunday afternoon Christmas films. You know the ones that are continuously played on the Christmas 24 channel. The one that you can probably figure out how it’s going to end within 2 minutes. We sat there listing all the traits that the films had, and if it was a drinking game looking out for all these traits, we all would’ve been drunk very quickly!

I don’t who suggested but the idea of me writing one of these films came up. They are my guilty pleasure and I’ll say that already I’ve watched my favourite one Matchmaker Santa twice this Christmas season already (there was nothing else on TV!) My mum and I have seen a fair few of these and I’m sure my dad has seen his fair share as well. Together we all worked on a basic plot and I thought this might actually work.

Then a few days later I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep for a couple of hours. So I thought I’d listen to some Christmas music and figure out the plot in detail. But I was focused more on trying to get back to sleep and thought my amazing brain would remember the plot I got sussed. Wrong! I woke up the next day only remembering the start and the end.

I saw on a Screen Craft post on Facebook about using note cards to write out plot points and spreading them all out to help figure out the structure of the screenplay.

So I thought I’d give this a go. I didn’t strictly have plot points written. I’d started brainstorming character development and ideas for things to include in the screenplay. So I wrote those down first and then explained the plot to my parents. Then we all came up with different ideas of how we could get from the start to the finish. How different characters could be developed, the traits in those films and how they could be featured. We managed to come up with two great names for the male and female leads (for some reason my dad was adamant that the male lead had an Italian sounding surname!) It was a lot of fun working on ideas with my parents, and at times I struggled to keep up with writing down all they were coming up with.

We didn’t entirely figure out the whole plot; there’s a part about halfway through that I need to figure out in its entirety but armed with my index note pointers I managed to write a pretty detailed synopsis for the screenplay and even wrote 3 pages straight away.

Now being in the festive season, I’m hoping that the dialogue flows easily. Who knows maybe I’ll get it written by Christmas.