Question: What’s the best way to teach children screenwriting?

Open Forum question from 305Writer:

Whats the best way to teach young kids the basics of screenwriting, and at what age should you get them into it.

Rob.

That depends. If you’re talking about some sort of formalized after-school project or working one-on-one with a child because of their interest in movies. And per the latter, that all depends upon the type of mind the child has, what type of learner they are. But speaking generally, here’s what I’ve done in presentations to children in the past.

I select a movie with which they’re familiar. From that movie, I pick a scene sequence I’m pretty sure they enjoy. I play that scene. We discuss what’s cool and fun about it. Then I ask this question:

Do you know that somebody wrote that scene?

That leads into a discussion of screenwriting, compare it to writing short stories, comic books, etc. Then I hand them each a copy of the script pages that are tied to the movie scene we watched. I ask for volunteers to act out the parts (read the dialogue) of the key roles and we do a table reading (with me reading scene description). Kids loves this.

Then we watch the movie scene again, only now referencing the screenplay pages.

Next I pass around a copy of the entire script, let the kids touch it, flip through the pages. They typically get pretty wowed by how long the script is. That leads to this:

You may think of a story by how many pages it is. A screenwriter thinks mostly in terms of scenes.

And we discuss what a scene is, referencing the opening scene we watched in the movie. The idea is to get them thinking of screenwriting as scene-writing. Because it’s much easier to think about writing 45–60 scenes than it is to write 100–120 pages. 

Then I’ll say let’s write a scene. And we brainstorm a story scenario and characters. Here we talk about some of the key requirements of a scene: Has to have a point, a beginning, middle, and end, have to choose which characters are in it, normally there’s a problem / goal in play. 

And so we’ll talk out a scene, writing it out on the chalkboard, then do another table reading.

After that, I’ll go macro on them, working off the scene. This character here, that is what we call a Protagonist. That character there, they are in opposition to the Protagonist, so we call them an Antagonist. I’ll ask them for their favorite Protags and Antags. We talk about goals and conflict. 

And then I step back even further, getting into the idea of the hero’s journey. If they’ve read The Odyssey, I reference that story and chart it out — how the hero starts out here, goes on a journey, then returns home a transformed individual, which brings up the idea of transformation.

That’s about enough for an introduction to screenwriting, so I’ll sum up what we’ve discussed, ending with the screenwriter’s goal is typically to create a hero’s journey, a series of scenes that tell a story from beginning, middle, and end, generally a Protagonist and an Antagonist. Invite the kids the next time they see a movie to think about the story with these ideas in mind.

I’ve done this with children as young as 8. Yes, 8! And they get it. They’ve grown up with stories, so they already have an intuitive sense of what they’re about. The teaching is just about plugging in new lingo and theoretical structure to apply to what they already know in their hearts and minds.

I’ve only done single presentations with young children, never taught a full course. If I was tasked with that, I guess what I’d try to do is for the class to write a short screenplay, a group effort with lots of brainstorming. Perhaps I’d assign them an exercise like for the next session, each of them will write their own version of a scene for the story we’re working on. But mostly make it fun, heavy on right-brain creativity.

I’ll bet there are GITS readers who have taught screenwriting to children. What do you do? How do you approach it?

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