I am quoting Salman Rushdie from the back of my memory, so maybe it’s a paraphrase, but here is the wisdom: ‘A lot of people start writing books but authors finish them.’ For me, that is a really big statement. It begs the question why? Not ‘why do people start writing books,’ but why don’t they finish writing them? I think this is a very important question for students because it places a spotlight on the real issue of developing an idea, an argument, and communicating it through writing. It really does not matter if it is creative writing or not. The problem of developing and articulating an argument in a lengthy document means a lot of ideas fizzle anywhere after page one.
Why does an idea fizzle? In our screenwriting classes at Pittsburgh Filmmakers we talk about this a lot. Like any other effective facilitation or decision-making process the first step is to identify the problem. The problem behind fizzling ideas is that the thesis is not sufficiently developed. There is not enough material to develop into an argument, err, a feature film or novel length text. There might not even be enough for a short story or digital short length script. Without fully exploring the thesis, or the story we want to tell, it is easy to end up with vignettes that stall in terms of story-telling, no matter how artfully they are articulated.
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