Jan 28, 2021
After months of writing dialog for an audio drama, I came to a grinding halt. Most of my writing came through an inside-out process, where I jumped into a conversation with a specific inspiration and found a flow. What came out are inconsistent sections that I later glued together into a scene. What didn’t come out were the important parts of a story. What does the main character want? What is driving the action? How do we see the characters change?
Yesterday I spoke with my writing coach, and through her brilliant use of the Socratic method I was able to understand what I needed, a story board. I spent weeks trying other writer’s methods of story telling. Outlining, character descriptions, and imagination exercises were not helping me turn my abstract ideas into solid stories. Today, I sketched several of the locations where the first scenes take place. I used Pinterest and Google maps to find reference images for kitchens, hallways, bustops, and jail intake rooms. These pictures helped me quickly pencil basic sets which has already inspired more ideas for the plot and characters. This has shown me that there is a visual piece of my imagination that I can harness to turn muddy concepts into concrete scenes.
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