Creative Writing!!

My class recently completed a workshop on creative writing in which we learned writing techniques and were shown some examples of great stories.

JK Rowling said this about stories,

"It is the power that enables us to

empathise with humans whose

experiences we have never shared"

This shows that a good story will have characters and/or situations that the audience can relate to or empathise with, and films also need to meet these objectives to make them interesting and worth watching.

We were taught that no story is completely original and is always influenced by a story before it, we were given the example of an ancient Indian tale called 'The Loyal Mongoose' which has been shared through hundreds on generations and adapted for the current audience to empathise better throughout the centuries. The story is about a farmer who found a baby mongoose and took it home to his wife to take care of. The mongoose became a loyal pet. One day, the farmer left his sleeping son and mongoose alone in the house and went to the market. A deadly snake got into the house and tried to attack the boy. But the mongoose stopped it and fought with it. There was a fierce fight between them. Unfortunately, when the farmer and his wife came back home and saw blood around, they assumed that the mongoose had killed their baby and killed the mongoose.

The Loyal Mongoose was adapted into the Welsh classic, Faithful Gelert which is the same story but with a dog instead of a mongoose; this eventually further adapted into the blockbuster Disney film Lady and the Tramp (1956).

The original Mongoose story was adapted throughout the years and has seen many different versions throughout the years with a lot of success; this could be because in the original story, you can empathise with characters. Empathy is the core of any story. It is this that is passed on through the ages and these stories are refined and developed and are adapted to suit customs, events and opinions of the time.

Another story that has been adapted many times is the story of Jesus. More specifically, the sacrifice of a protagonist. In Spiderman 2 (2004), Doc Octavius pulls his nuclear fission device into the sea, sacrificing himself in the process for the greater good much like Jesus. He is even in the crucifixion pose as he sinks.

Another example is Superman, every time he is injured or seems close to death he falls down in the crucifixion pose. He could be considered a "Jesus" like figure as he is born from higher beings (aliens) and came down

to earth to save the people. This is another example that no stories are original as even Superman

is a direct rip from the story of Jesus.

After learning about these similarities in stories and the power of empathy, we were instructed to apply our own personal experiences to the creation of a story. We were shown the prompt "I should not be at this party!" which had to be the first line in our story, after we added our own emotions to a story with this prompt, we were told to introduce a portal that takes the character to another world which added that disconnect from the original story and ended up making all of our stories individually unique. We ended up writing our own stories using a lot of symbolism relating to our own personal experiences much like what we had seen in Superman and Spiderman.

Steven Spielberg

A good example of a great storywriter using their emotions in their work is Steven Spielberg. He was bullied in school for being Jewish and this eventually led to him hating his own religion. One of his first feature length films was Duel (1971) about a man being chased through the desert by a big truck and eventually being led of a cliff and dying. For Spielberg, the truck represented the bullies in his life and how it seemed he could never escape them. He had put his own experiences and emotions into his story but then made it about a truck chasing a man instead of a group of bullies.

As you can see from the ending clip, there is no big Hollywood explosions when the truck "dies", it slowly falls down the cliff and crumbles. It even includes symbolism such as the oil dripping like blood and the fan blowing inside symbolising surrender. The producers of this movie were not happy with Spielberg as it didn't have a crazy ending but the reason behind this is that Spielberg represented the truck in his mind as the bullies that were always chasing him in his childhood. The producers expected this film to not be liked due to this but because of the added empathy from Spielberg's emotions and personal experiences it was a story that everyone could relate to and enjoy, especially if they had experienced bullying in their life.

Spielberg had a bad relationship with his father, Arnold Spielberg, due to his parents divorce when he was a child. These emotions can be seen in many of his films such as War of the Worlds (2005), Indiana Jones: The last crusade (1989) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) which all include "deadbeat dads" in them, yet another example of using his emotions and experiences in his stories. The initial concept for ET was an exploration of the question of how a divorce effects a child. How do you fill the heart of a lonely child who has lost his dad? Spielberg using his trauma to bring empathy and relatability to his movies. Most, if not all Spielberg films characters are bound by family and community, many of his films feature separation of family like War of the Worlds and then in the end they are reunited just like Spielberg wanted his parents to do after their divorce.

Finally, we were instructed to select a memory of our own and then through freewriting, re-write the event using fictional characters and environments. We were told to use fantasy or sci-fi to embed the emotions you experienced into a fictional setting. This is same technique Spielberg uses to create his blockbuster movies which is the best way to create engaging films that can evoke empathy from the audience.

I enjoyed this workshop as I would like to be creatively writing in the future and making my own films and this workshop showed me some very good influences and how to make a good story which relates to my future ambitions. I found this workshop easy as it relates to my future ambitions. Compared to other workshops, this one was definitely more relevant for my future goals but was less engaging as it was a lot of research.