Writing Prescription Sixteen

"All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened." Ernest Hemingway

I was speaking to a friend the other day, discussing the movie, 'The Blair Witch Project'. He told me he considered it the greatest marketing coo in the history of film. Though fictional, it is presented as if it depicted real events. The film relates the story of three student filmmakers who disappeared while hiking in the Black Hills near Burkittsville, Maryland in 1994 to film a documentary about a local legend known as the Blair Witch. The viewers are told the three were never seen or heard from again, although their video and sound equipment (along with most of the footage they shot) was discovered a year later by the police department and that this "recovered footage" is the film the viewer is watching.

The marketing was ingenious - the first widely released movie marketed primarily by internet. The movie's official website featured fake police reports and 'newsreel-style' interviews. Due to this, some people initially thought it was an actual documentary about the 'missing' teenagers. These augmented the movie's found footage style to spark debates across the internet over whether the movie was a real-life documentary or a work of fiction. The initial investment by the three University of Central Florida filmmakers was about US$35,000. The Blair Witch Project grossed $248,639,099 worldwide.

Something in the movie script and storyline hooked the viewers. CURIOSITY was the trigger - everyone wanted to know what was going to happen next. It begs the question, how does a writer create curiosity?

1. Surprise us - all is not as it seems beginning with the opening sentence;

2. Get your reader asking, "What is this story about?", "What problem does the hero have to solve, and what will he/ she have to overcome to do it?"

3. Make your reader slip into the protagonist’s skin - the protagonist must react to everything that happens to him;

4. Let your reader know the protagonists goal and outcome - everything that happens in the story gets its meaning and emotional weight based on whether it moves him closer to his goal, or further from it;

5. Only tell us what we need to know;

6. Give us specifics - the reader doesn't think in the abstract; they think in concrete images. If they can't see it, they can't feel it and so it will have no impact on them;

7. Give us conflict – it is conflict that readers come for so they can vicariously experience what they've been scrupulously avoiding in real life. They want to know what it would cost emotionally to take the same risks. And ultimately, what they may gain;

8. Be mean to your protagonist - make him face whatever demons are holding him back;

9. The storyline must be sequential and make sense to the readers logic ie. cause and effect, action-reaction-decision.

New word: IMPETUOSITY – vigorousness, haste, excitability, rashness.

Character flaw # PACIFIST: opposition to war/ violence of resolving disputes, avoids conflict and confrontation.