15*15 Creativity Exercise Series — 3

Turn 15 of your life experiences into movie scenes

This is your opportunity to go on creative adventures of plotting

Ladies and gentlemen;

In this series (15*15), I am very excited to design and present you 15 adventures and challenges in 15 days. The goal of these challenges is to help you expand your imagination and exercise your muscles of creativity.

This is the third day and third installment of that series.

I am developing these challenges in real-time — I hope you do enjoy and benefit from these exercises.

Our third-day challenge is about choosing and reflecting on 15 stories, slices, or experiences from your life.

Your goal will be to turn these stories into screenwriting for cinema or the TV.

Your Challenge: Turn 15 life experiences into movie scenes

For this challenge, you will need to make a list of worthwhile experiences or interesting stories from your life.

These experiences will serve as your anchor points and inspiration for possible scenes in a movie.

Imagine: This movie could be a Hollywood movie about your life.

Imagine that your life is being made into a movie by a Hollywood studio.

What would be the key experiences or stories that could make it to the final cut?

Some scenes might be bittersweet, some others could be sad, and some might be happy moments. Perhaps you have encountered particular challenges and solved them through hard work, perseverance, and creativity. Perhaps you fell in love and experienced heartbreak. Maybe you had to leave your family and town behind and moved to a new country to establish a new life.

Are there any elements of adventure? Mystery? Drama? Comedy? Unexpected twists and turns?

Try to go deep into your memories and capture the details: Where were you? Can you remember and describe the physical setting (sights, sounds, smell, colors, furniture, layout, people, dresses etc.)? How was the atmosphere? What was the context? What were you doing? Who are the important characters in your story? How did they speak or act? How did you respond? How did the events unfold? What were memorable? Why is this scene significant? What do we learn from this scene?

Think like a documentarian of your life and document 15 stories.

For the purposes of this exercise, please do not delve into too much detail though. Aim for 5–6 minutes of writing for each scene. You do not need to put all the conversations or event sequences. Try to write down the minimum viable scene or just a snapshot. If you want to delve in and go deeper, leave it for later.

Try to come up with 15 different scenes and try to aim for a diverse range of stories, emotions, settings, and characters.

If you do not have the time or the will to complete all 15, you can choose several for now, and leave the rest for later.

If you want to get further inspiration and suggestions on how to write good scenes, check out the following guides:

Remember: You are doing this to have fun. Just play the game. Mess around and improvise. Try to surprise yourself and your brain.

Let us start if you are ready — please do the challenge and take notes on the unfolding scenes. Use extra space as needed.

You will benefit a lot from exercising your creative muscles and getting out of your comfort zone. If you do the exercise above, you will strengthen your creative muscles 15 times.

You will also experience a lot of ambiguity and uncertainty — because this is an activity which requires going out of your comfort zone.

It is important to start very small and treat these exercises as pure play. They are small experiments in imagination. They work much better if you stop judging your work and obsessing over the quality of your writing.

Remember: All masterpieces start with small steps. Small actions are all that you need. You will instantly jump in the water without thinking. Thinking too much hurts your creativity because it paralyzes you. Every creative act starts with taking a leap of faith into the unkown. Each time you jump into the unknown makes you more adventurous, confident, open, and creative.

We need to give our brain creative challenges every day. If we make this a habit, the process will help us rewire our brains to be more open to creativity.

If today’s challenges were inspiring for you and you would like to explore screenwriting further, here is a masterclass from Aaron Sorkin:

See you in the fourth episode of this journey tomorrow.

I hope we can all be good storytellers and writers.

Fahri

Fahri Karakas is the author of the Self-making Studio. You can explore more here.