The EEEEasy Approach to Great Storytelling and Screenwriting

By Trevor L. Smith

Do you want to be a great storyteller or screenwriter? Well, consider it done! It all starts with a decision... and The EEEEasy Approach to Great Storytelling and Screenwriting is a step-by-step comprehensive guidebook that will teach you how to craft great stories and characters that are compelling and as unique as you are.

You will learn how to write a professional industry-standard screenplay or manuscript, and this book will give you the tools, inspiration, and motivation to turn your decision into action so that you can start and finish your creative projects.

The EEEEasy Approach to Great Storytelling and Screenwriting is Trevor L. Smith’s unique method of teaching the structure and form (not formula) of great storytelling and screenwriting, focusing on the four simple and EEEEasy elements of experience, express, extract, and embody, to help you build complex stories, and characters that are unique, real, and relatable. This book will teach you great storytelling and screenwriting in a way that is EEEEasy to learn and understand so you can start writing with creative excellence... Now.

In this book you will learn how to:

Find story-worthy ideas • Turn your ideas into a premise • Develop your premise into an engaging story • Masterfully develop characters and dialogue • Write professional and visually written screenplays • Protect your intellectual property • Effectively rewrite your stories and scripts • Draft attention-grabbing loglines and query letters • Set goals, establish and change mindsets, overcome writer’s block, and more...

This book is perfect for new screenwriters and authors, struggling writers who feel stuck and unable to complete their projects, experienced writers looking for a fresh perspective, and producers, directors, actors, and any creatives with a desire to tell their own engaging stories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trevor L. Smith
• Release date: Dec 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9780988838321

Trevor L. Smith

Trevor L. Smith has been writing, directing, producing, educating, and inspiring people in creative arts for over 20 years. His original written and visual works, including short and feature-length films, have been shown in theaters, secured domestic and international distribution, carried by Netflix, and have been film festival nominees and award winners for technical and performance excellence.Trevor is an author, produced screenwriter, award-winning filmmaker, motivational speaker, and founder of Legacy Street, LLC and Legacy Street Academy, a non-profit organization committed to changing the world through free creative arts classes, training, and job placement. He teaches students and mentors aspiring screenwriters internationally and is a sought-after consultant and script doctor.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

The purpose of this book, like many others, is to demystify the process of telling a great story and writing a professional industry-standard screenplay. This book was written to empower you as a storyteller, equip you as a writer, and help you to embrace and learn from your own uniqueness and individuality so that you can tell impactful, professionally written stories in your own creative voice and style.

In the real world, your life experience, relationships, and personal character development play a vital role in your day-to-day life; they influence your beliefs, behaviors and attitudes, words and actions, the messages you communicate and how you communicate those messages, and the same should be true for the characters within your stories. You want your reader or audience to experience something from what you’re expressing, and your story-characters themselves, along with their unique experiences, expressions, and the conflicts they face, are the vehicles that will carry the message of your story to accomplish your intended purpose.

In this book, you will learn to evaluate and extract the events (plots) and dialogue that happen within your stories that are not true to your characters’ experiences and what you want your audience to experience, and you will learn how to skillfully embody the dialogue of your characters through action or inaction. There are many great methods to improve storytelling and screenwriting, but needless to say, I am a huge fan of the EEEEasy Approach and I love every aspect of the process because it is so personal and unique to each writer. For many years it has worked wonderfully for me and the aspiring writers I’ve had the privilege of teaching and mentoring.

This book was written in a simple and easy to understand way, to give you the tools and inspiration needed to tell a great story and write a properly formatted screenplay or manuscript. I consider myself a lifelong learner, and I encourage everyone to continue to pursue knowledge. However, I believe some that pursue writing become so overwhelmed with knowledge that they become paralyzed and unable to act upon that knowledge; they were taught one way in a class, told to do something entirely different in books, videos said do it this way, seminars said do it that way, one working professional said this is the correct way, and yet another professional said do the opposite. Many of you know exactly what I’m talking about. Like a twisted game of Twister, some aspiring writers don’t take action because they simply can’t. Their minds are so warped and bent from the knowledge they’ve obtained, they can’t take physical action because of their opposing thoughts and understandings; so they just keep doing what they can; they acquire more and more knowledge, which feels like progress, and it is… If they would actually write something.

If you are a new writer or screenwriter, this book was written to give you a sense of freedom and to inspire and encourage you to not only learn, but to act on the knowledge you obtain. Strive for excellence in the things you do understand, and continue to chip away to become better in your areas of uncertainty… while you are writing. My wife is admittedly terrible at backing up and parallel parking our car, but that does not stop her from driving. As you write, I encourage you to work on developing any areas you don’t fully get, while having the mindset that you will maximize your strengths and minimize your weaknesses, until you are able to eliminate the weaknesses. It is my hope that this book will also help struggling writers to get unstuck so they can finish their projects, and that experienced writers might gain a fresh perspective or new tools to add to their creative arsenal.

This book will teach you my personal approach for telling great stories and writing screenplays, but ultimately you must do what works for you to get you the results that you are wanting. So I encourage you to learn, adopt this process, or change and customize this method to best suit your individuality. As we will discuss later in this book, your process doesn’t matter to your readers, the end result does.

Foundationally, you can’t have a great story without story structure; a beginning (set-up), middle (conflict), and an end (resolution). This book will teach you step-by-step how to outline your stories using the three-act structure (a form of good storytelling, not a formula), how to properly format a spec screenplay, and you will learn the rules and laws that govern screenwriting, so that you know the rules you can bend to help you to uniquely express yourself, and know the laws that you should never break.

It is my hope that the information contained in this book will not bind you, but release you to do what you have been doing your entire life, telling stories. Here you will learn how to couple your natural abilities with the knowledge and insights you gain from this book, to craft great stories and write in such a way that you can reach a wider audience with your message, and accomplish the goals that you have set for yourself. It’s just that EEEEasy.

Experience, express, extract, and embody, are the foundation of The EEEEasy Approach to Great Storytelling and Screenwriting. This book in no way attempts to take away what anyone else teaches or has taught regarding what you need and should learn about storytelling and screenwriting, but it encourages you to focus on and lay a foundation that is unique to you based on your individuality, your real world life experiences and relationships, your personal observations and understanding of human nature, and what you are wanting to express in your stories.

Complexity in the well-crafted screenplay is built on simplicity.

Taking the EEEEASY Approach does not mean you can’t write a complex story with complex characters. To the contrary, after reading this book and applying its principles to your storytelling, you will be able to do just that, and in a way that is unique to who you are as a person and as a storyteller and screenwriter. Complexity is built on simplicity. Creatively, everything I’ve learned and now teach, I break down to its simplest form in order to understand, build upon, and apply, so that I can achieve success according to how I define success; not anyone else’s definition. Likewise, though we may have some things in common, you are the only one who can truly define success for you. With that being said, I encourage you to be clear about specifically what it is that you are wanting to accomplish with your writing because that is what I am hoping you are able to achieve through what you learn from this book.

Learning techniques and principles are great, applying them to your life and living them will take you to a whole new level of awesome. Within the pages of this book, I will teach you my exact process for great storytelling and screenwriting, which is not something you will just learn to do, but will become something you live (experience). Learn and apply the principles in this book that work for you, and if needed, alter and replace the principles that may not work for you, so that you can achieve the results you are wanting. One of the philosophies of the late and great, Bruce Lee, which I fully agree with and incorporate within my teaching is, Absorb what is useful, discard what is not. Add what is uniquely your own. In following this process, your unique personal life experience will help to shape your writing, your characters’ development, their life experiences, and their dialogue. As a result, your characters’ responses, reactions, and initiated actions will truthfully reflect their individuality when confronted with the events that you as the writer throw at them. I firmly believe that so many face unnecessary challenges in their storytelling and screenwriting because they try to tell stories and write exactly like everyone else; the problem is, we are not like anyone else. The reason I believe this method of storytelling has resonated with so many other writers is because their unique individual life experiences become a foundation that all the other storytelling elements can be built upon, especially in regards to character development and dialogue.

In this book, we are going to focus on story, the mechanics of screenwriting, as well as address some of the mindsets that may prevent writers from starting and finishing their projects. There are those, and you may be one of them, who have read a lot of books, watched videos, attended classes, and obtained all the knowledge they need to write a screenplay, but for whatever reason, they just don’t write. Limiting beliefs and self-sabotage are very real issues that plague people in many areas in life, so I will address some of those mindsets in hopes that everyone who reads this book will feel equipped and empowered to start and finish their projects.

You may have heard how difficult it is to write a screenplay. The reality is, for some it is difficult, but for others it is not. If you have not written a screenplay before, I encourage you not to go into it thinking that it’s hard. Why? Because respectfully speaking, you have not written one before, so you have not earned the right to say that it’s hard; you haven’t done it. We are all wired different, and screenwriting just may come easy for you. Now, if you’ve already been trying to write your story or screenplay and you haven’t been successful, perhaps it’s because you haven’t found the right process that works for you, or there might be mindsets that you may not even be aware that you have, preventing you from accomplishing your goal. This book and the EEEEasy approach was designed to help you to overcome the obstacles standing in the way of your creative success.

No disrespect to anyone who feels otherwise, but I firmly believe that the actual mechanics of screenwriting are easy to learn and apply to write a properly formatted and excellent industry-standard screenplay. To me, the real challenge is in crafting a great story to be placed within the framework of your screenplay or manuscript. My process, which you will learn and hopefully follow (or customize for yourself), is to first, beyond anything else, help you to craft a great story. Then you can write that great story as a book, television script, proof of concept, short or feature-length film screenplay, etc. Regardless of what type of project you’re writing, your prime directive is to have a great story to tell.

You can’t write a great screenplay or manuscript without having a great story; you can have proper structure with correct margins, page counts, visual writing, proper use of the screenplay elements, and flawless grammar and punctuation, but it won’t matter to the ones reading the material if the story is terrible. No manager, agent, producer, studio, or production company is going to say, Wow that story was just awful, but they sure had great formatting. Let’s make them an offer. That’s not going to happen. Your stories must be great, and this book will help you to craft a great story.

I hope you are excited and ready to dive in and take The EEEEasy Approach to Great storytelling and Screenwriting. I am truly honored to be a part of your creative journey and I am excited for you and your success.

THE EEEEASY APPROACH

The EEEEasy Approach to Great Storytelling and Screenwriting focuses on the elements of Experience, Express, Extract, and Embody. It’s at the core of everything creative that I learn and teach. Over the last two decades, I’ve attended many classes on storytelling and screenwriting, attended workshops, read books, watched countless videos, and I continue to do so, but at the heart of it all, my EEEEasy approach has been my foundation for not only my personal expressions through art, but in teaching great storytelling, screenwriting, filmmaking, music, and martial arts, where I have personally trained international champions in forms, sparring, and weapons as the owner-operator of my own karate school. Let’s look at the four elements that make up the EEEEasy Approach:

EXPERIENCE

ex·pe·ri·ence

/ˌikˈspirēəns/

Experience is defined as the process of doing and seeing things, and of having things happen to you; an event or occurrence that leaves an impression on someone; encounter or undergo (an event or occurrence); to feel (an emotion).

Who you are as a person right now is a result of everything that has ever happened to you in your life. From the moment you first entered into this world, all the good, the bad, and the ugly of your life experiences, with all your goals, dreams and aspirations, beliefs and worldviews, relationships, all your decisions, your successes, failures and flaws, obstacles and conflicts, disappointments, and even the dreams you are chasing right now, have brought you to this moment in time.

How you speak, carry yourself, react and respond to certain external and internal influences, and the actions that you initiate, are a direct result of your internal makeup and life experience. This is your own personal character development (which I will discuss in detail later), from which stems your unique way of communicating and expressing yourself, and it forms your unique way of being and speaking. Who you were in the past, who you are now, and who you hope to become in the future is all contained in this moment as you read these very words, and the same should be true of your main characters. When you introduce your characters into your story, or they appear on screen for the first time, everything they are internally and externally, and who they wish to become, is on the inside of them at that moment.

We will look more into character development and dialogue later in this book; two vital elements in your stories that cannot be separated. Character development and dialogue go hand-in-hand, and I encourage writers not to view them separately. Many writers openly express that they have a problem writing dialogue. I would venture to say that the problem is generally not the dialogue itself, but with your characters’ development (life experiences), the events we thrusts upon them, or the scenarios we as writers place them in. For the most part, you know with some measure of certainty how you personally would act or speak in almost any given scenario, and pretty much how you think you would respond in a situation no matter how extreme, unlikely or improbable. I can make that rather bold determination because you know you, and if you don’t, that is still a part of your character development.

I firmly believe what is missing in many stories are the characters’ experiences that go beyond merely doing a character development breakdown. A lot of writers’ characters in the screenplays that I’ve read over the past twenty years are flat and don’t come to life, because the writers don’t tap into the crucial life experiences of their characters that have shaped their lives. Character development is far more detailed, intricate and intimate than just giving a character a past, inner and external conflicts, strengths, weaknesses, goals, flaws, etc. Though those things are necessary and important to your character building and dialogue, honing in on and exploring specific experiences that have shaped your characters’ lives, I believe will elevate your overall character development and help you to create very real, three-dimensional characters that come alive in your writings. And a powerful key to being able to do this form of character development is by you examining the experiences in your own life that have shaped you, so that you can ensure that your characters have their own experiences that influence their thought processes, their verbal and non-verbal communication, and their actions. As you continue on in this book, keep in mind that your personal experiences when embraced, no matter what you’ve gone through, will help you to create unique characters and stories that can give your readers a unique experience through your characters that deliver the message you as a writer are wanting to express.

When you think about experience, in addition to your personal experience and that of your characters’, a question that you want to ask and answer is, what you want your reader or audience to experience throughout your story and upon its resolution. This is your voice and message, and when you're writing your story or screenplay, you're going to keep coming back to this element as a form of checks and balances to ensure you are staying in line with what you are wanting to accomplish with your story. Are the plots within your story bringing about the experience you want your reader and eventual audience to have? And are the characters themselves the right vehicles for your story to deliver that message?

In response to the plots you place within your story, which should serve to move your story along towards its resolution, your characters should speak, respond, react and initiate their own actions that are true to their life experiences, or respond in a way that truthfully reveals the growth they’ve achieved through other characters or events that happen within your story. If there are falsehoods in your characters’ words or actions, those are things that need to be revised or extracted

EXPRESS

ex·press

/ikˈspres/

Express is defined as to convey (a thought or feeling) in words or by gestures and conduct; say or otherwise communicate what one thinks or means.

Your reader and your audience are going to take something away from your story, so you should to be clear about the message you are wanting to express, because it is the theme of your story. In storytelling, the theme is the underlying meaning of your story, your unique message, point-of-view, or viewpoint about life. For example, your story’s theme may be something along the lines of a message about love. What about love? … We’ll, that’s what you’re going to tell us through the characters and events that take place within your story. In your creative voice, you are going to communicate your worldview about love, or if not yours personally, a unique perspective on love. Your theme might be about the rich in society versus the poor. What about the rich in society versus the poor? Again, that’s what you need to communicate to your reader through your story, whether it’s from your own personal beliefs based on your life experience, or from another viewpoint, you are going to give your reader or audience a unique perspective on the rich versus the poor in society. Generally your theme should not simply be about one perspective, but a worldview that goes beyond a single person’s view, and expresses a universal belief written from a unique perspective.

Your theme can be about family, single parenthood, addictions, war, politics, friendship, revenge, mental illness, romance, betrayal, social injustice, technology, education, sacrifice, etc. There is no one else on the planet exactly like you, my friend. So your perspective on the world we live in, can and should be just as unique as you are within the expressed themes of your stories. The same is true of your characters inhabiting your story world. Here are some things you can ask yourself and answer to dial in your theme:

What you as a writer are wanting to express through the characters and events within your story, must remain in line with what you are wanting your reader or audience to experience through your story and the message received by them upon its resolution.

Along with what the message that you are as the writer are wanting to express, comes dialogue, the words our characters speak within our stories. If you have previous writing experience and struggle with dialogue, just know that you’re in good company. Many writers struggle with the words that their characters speak, but I don’t believe that they have to. Through my personal experience as a writer, I’ve come to believe that a properly developed character with life experience, when put in any given situation, will express themselves and speak and act accordingly, just as you personally do in real life.

EXTRACT

ex·tract

/ikˈstrakt/

Extract is defined as, to remove or take out, especially by effort or force; to draw forth, take out, or pull out; to release or set free; obtain from someone in the face of initial unwillingness.

When it comes to the extraction element, anything in your story or screenplay that does not in some way move your story forward, support your message or the experience you want your reader or audience to have, and the dialogue or actions that are not true to