2016 Scene-Writing Challenge: All 22 Prompts
For the fourth straight year, June was Scene-Writing Month here at Go Into The Story. Each Monday through Friday, I posted a writing prompt and here are all 22 of them:
Day 1 challenge: A scene set in an inhospitable environment, e.g., outer space, underwater, desert.
Day 2 challenge: A scene involving a secret.
Day 3 challenge: Two people talk while dancing.
Day 4 challenge: The audience knows something the characters don’t.
Day 5 challenge: Miscommunication.
Day 6 challenge: A character reviews a series of voice mails, each with worse news.
Day 7 challenge: An intervention.
Day 8 challenge: A scene with a man holding a gun.
Day 9 challenge: Introduce a character with a memorable impression.
Day 10 challenge: A conversation with someone who’s locked him/herself in the bathroom.
Day 11 challenge: One character has to break bad news to the other.
Day 12 challenge: A scene where the entire conversation takes place off-screen.
Day 13 challenge: Settling an argument by playing Rock, Paper, Scissors.
Day 14 challenge: A pet uses voice-over narration to comment on a family fight.
Day 15 challenge: Leaving a voice mail.
Day 16 challenge: Smack talk at a sporting event.
Day 17 challenge: A character has a ‘conversation’ with him/herself in the mirror.
Day 18 challenge: A scene inspired by this photograph.
Day 19 challenge: Interruption.
Day 20 challenge: A scene involving a dead body.
Day 21 challenge: Strangers biding their time in a hospital emergency waiting room.
Day 22 challenge: Under a deadline.
Why scene-writing? If the average scene is 1 1/2 to 2 pages long and a script is 100–120 pages, then a screenwriter writes between 50–80 scenes per screenplay. Thus in a very real way, screenwriting is scene-writing. The better we get at writing scenes, it stands to reason the better we get as a screenwriter.
To provide extra motivation for this series — to get people to WRITE PAGES — I gave away some of my Core classes to Scene-Writing Challenge participants. That’s right: For free! And dozens of GITS readers wrote 10 scenes and provided feedback on 10 scenes written by others to qualify for their free Core class.
You can check out the fruits of our collective labor from the last three years:
Scene-Writing Exercises (2013)
Scene-Writing Exercises (2014)
Scene-Writing Exercises [2015]
Congratulations to everyone who participated in this year’s Scene-Writing Challenge!