New GITS Initiative: More Writing Challenges
Over the weekend, Go Into The Story turned 7 years old. As that birthday approached, I thought it was a good time to step back and reflect about the blog. As part of that process, I invited your feedback here and here. The response has been great via the blog, email, and Twitter. So each day this week, I’d like to present some initiatives that have surfaced during this process. A few of them I’m just going to go ahead and take on. Some, however, I’m going to request your additional feedback.
New GITS Initiative: More Writing Challenges
One request I get every time I run a writing challenge is this: MORE!!! Some of that has to do with the free stuff I give away to qualifying participants. But enough people write to let me know they are genuinely excited about GITS providing an impetus for them to write.
Right now, we have two annual writing challenges on the books:
Dialogue Writing Challenge: During January, every participant who completes 10 of 20 exercises using dialogue prompts provided here and comments on 10 posts by other writers qualifies for a free Craft class, one of eight I offer through Screenwriting Master Class in the first half of the year.
Scene Writing Challenge: During June, every participant who completes 10 of 20 exercises using scene prompts provided here and comments on 10 posts by other writers qualifies for a free Core class, one of eight I offer through Screenwriting Master Class in the second half of the year.
Those are locked down in my calendar. In addition, I’ve run occasional challenges wherein participants come up with imaginative loglines using words from word clouds. The word clouds have derived from the loglines from all of that year’s spec script deals to loglines from all of the annual Black List scripts. Since those tend to overlap (the annual Black List comes out in December), what I could do is move the Black List Word Cloud Logline Challenge to April and the Spec Script Deal Word Cloud Logline Challenge to September, then we would have quarterly writing challenges. By the way, the Word Cloud Challenges tend to come with prizes as well including free script hosting on the Black List website and/or a 30 minute teleconference with yours truly.
But since I’m all about trying to get people to write, are there more writing challenge possibilities? Right now, we cover dialogue, scene, and loglines. What else could we do?
I am open to suggestion. Indeed let’s see if we can crowd-source at least two (2) new and different challenge concepts. I’m happy to offer free 1-week Core or Craft classes as prizes, as well as one-on-one half-hour calls with me.
So folks, got any ideas? If so, please head to comments with your thoughts.
To read about the new proposed Movie Analysis series, go here.
To read about the new proposed Monthly Screenplay Workshop proposal, go here.
And there’s this: Would you be interested in a Quest Writing Workshop?
If enough people enroll, I will conduct a three-day Quest Writing Workshop in Santa Monica, California in July. This is a chance for you to work with me on your story directly in a live setting.
Possible weekends:
Friday, July 17-Sunday, 19
Friday, July 24-Sunday, July 26
For more information, go here. If you are interested, email me.
Onward!