1. Examine Yourself
You must be good at one thing. Your mind must always be inclined to one thing. There is always one thing which is in you and which you so much enjoy doing. There is one aspect of entertainment, writing or communication that you have fun engaging yourself in.
May be you love mimicking peoples' speeches. Or, may be, you are good at imaginations.
You can also be good at always writing about the things you see or feel.
Some people enjoy telling stories both fictitious and non fictitious.
Some other people enjoy watching movies, and criticizing those movies afterwards.
Again, some people are very good at correcting grammatical mistakes made by their friends or colleagues.
Some others love reading and acting what they have read.
Everybody loves doing one thing or the other which pertains to social activities.
In writing; if you truly love writing, you have to examine yourself and find out the aspect of writing you like and enjoy. Just be sincere to yourself. It is a personal and internal exercise.
If you are good in writing descriptions of things you see or things that happen around you, you can be a good novel writer.
If you are good in imaginations creating stories and scenes in your mind; stories and scenes that have characters, their actions and their speeches; then you can be a good script writer.
If you love criticizing and analyzing issues and events that happen around you, in your society, then you can be a good article writer.
If you always correct you friends whenever they make mistakes in grammar, then you can be a good teacher, and you can even write books.
Writing is all about the passion to make what you love doing, seeing and feeling come alive. It is an internal response to the external activities.
You can't just perceive things and then keep quite. You've got to say something about them. You've got to write about them.
Writers do write to teach, entertain, address issues and correct impressions.
So, find the aspect you can fit in and then start working on it immediately.
1. Create a Jotting Mode
Ideas about what to write usually come whenever you are not ready to jot them down. This is true because ideas come carelessly. They do not come in a complete form. They occur to you indistinctly and it is left for you to make them distinct by writing them down, and then subsequently develop them.
Ideas occur to you like a wave of air that is ready to fly away in the very second it occurs. If you do not hold it and harness it, then you may need to wait until another time it comes.
Ideas will make you uncomfortable as you will go on and on trying to remember them if you didn't put them down.
Now, since these ideas usually occur whenever you are too busy to jot them down, there is need for you to create and design a way of jotting them.
There are many ways and forms of jotting, but any one you choose will depend on your daily schedules and dispositions.
One can jot on the paper or on their electronic devices.
Jotting on the paper will entail you carrying your paper jotter everywhere you go. And when an idea comes, you quickly bring it out and then jot the idea down. How comfortable would this be for you?
May be if you are a teacher, cashier, office secretary, lawyer or you do any other job that allows you sit at your table from morning till evening; this form of jotting may favor you.
What of those who always move or travel from one point to another as part of their job?
The answer is that they will use their mobile phones or any other mobile electronic device for the jotting.
Well, it all depends on you. Just know how best you can put down your ideas as they occur. The most important thing is to put them down no matter where you are, or no matter when they occur. Do not let any of them slip off.
3. Break Your Stories Down
You chose screen writing and you have also found a manageable and reliable means of jotting the ideas about the stories and other elements of the screenplay down.
Now, you have recorded a lot of ideas, right? That's good. The next thing you need to do is to define these ideas, which would be 'story building ideas', and then categorize them into genres, themes, characters, locations, settings, days, years, seasons or time they are likely to happen. Every group will have the same thing in common.
4. Pick Out the Elements
In a particular group, you still need to create a sub group for the members of that group that have very close common features.
Check the elements that are very similar to one another. Themes that are very similar to one another should be in the same sub group. Characters that are very similar to one another should be in the same sub group; and so on. Just do same for all the original groups and their members.
The essence is to streamline the various different features so as to make the writing job easier.
5. Make the Exercise a Fun and a Habit
Try and be in it. Try and enjoy doing it. You can only write a good piece if and only if you can give yourself in to writing. Writing will always command you; just be ready to obey it. But the only way to be ready to obey it is by making it a habit, having fun with it, and then enjoying it.
I know you do have fun surfing the internet, facebooking, tweeting, pinging and chatting with your phone. Why not also transfer some of that fun to writing down ideas that occur to you with that same phone? That time you use to write down the updates you are going to post on your social media page, why not also use some of that time to write down an idea that have been hovering around your mind?
Engage in some close and sincere examination of yourself. Have fun imagining yourself doing the things you wish. Wishful thoughts and fantasies are sometimes enjoyable, aren't they?
Once you put down your ideas, just imagine yourself as the creator of that idea and people are now paying to get to you. With this kind of thought, you will have the strength to move ahead and categorize your ideas and then keep them ready to use. Good ideas are costly, very costly, I must tell you. It only starts like a joke or a play, but when it starts becoming useful and sellable, it will no longer be a child's play.
So if you want to make things work for you in writing, you got to start having fun with it right now.
6. Collate Your Work
Now, gather everything. All the categories and all the sub categories; keep all of them in view.
It's possible you didn't note down your ideas on just one device or one note pad. Now is the time to bring them together in one device. This will surely make you concentrate and have a better view of all your ideas.
7. Work on Your Work
Start putting everything straight. Start developing your ideas. Start writing your first drafts. Start creating your characters. Start arranging your plots. Start fine tuning your story lines and themes. Start setting out the times and seasons. Start visualizing and designing your locations; start to work on your work.
This is the building moment. It may get frustrating and discouraging; but one thing will lead you; determination.
8. Save Your Work
Do not waste your work on the social media. Do not share your work on your facebook page or any other. Your facebook friends may not be your appropriate audience. Your facebook friends are just a group of persons who are like you. They are hungry for ideas too. They want what you want. They can copy your idea if you tell them about it. In this case, your facebook friends are simply your rivals.
Just keep your work safe and then target your appropriate audience.
Anyway, you can still give your friends a hint on what you are up to.
Again, you have to be careful about 'calls for competitions'. Do not just send or submit your work to competition organizers who you cannot trust. You always need to verify whether any call is genuine or not. And if you know your work is not fit to win the competition, do not submit.
9. Create a Channel
Your aim is to make your work reach the target audience. For this to happen, you need to create a channel for that. You should have in mind of protecting your ideas and work, but yet exposing it to the appropriate persons.
Some of the ways of doing this is by registering in various online and offline forums. In these forums, you will meet other great minds like you. Together you can discuss what it means to belong to those forums. You will learn more about packaging and giving your work final touches. One joyful thing is that these forums are where your appropriate audience comes to search for you. The forum can be a website, a chat group, a web page, a class, a club and so on. Apart from these forums, you can create a personal weblog where you teach audience about your experiences in harnessing your ideas. Here, you share what you passed through from the beginning to that point. You guide and teach them how to write screenplays and also other forms of writing.
Since you have been in writing, you can also to some extent teaching people how to write. Just teach them any how you can, provided they understand you.
But in all these, make sure you protect your original ideas and work.
As you keep on doing these, you are also learning more, and you are also building your background in writing.
At a particular time, believe me; you will start getting clients who are very ready to pay you.
10. Self Development
Now that you have done it, keep on doing it. Keep on developing yourself. Always be ready and prepared to serve your customers.
Seek new ideas and methods. Teach more people. Distinguish yourself from others. Push your talent to the limit.
Written by: Winston 'Winny Greazy' Oge
Follow on twitter: https://twitter.com/winny_greazy
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