A Five Finger Pitch – Scriptwriting Exercise

Tags

Future Learn course, Introduction to Scriptwriting, story development, storytelling, writing exercise

(THIS POST WILL BE MOVING TO Amorette Frances blog, my new blog focusing on writing, story crafting, exercises etc. Hope to see you there!)

 

This is task for one of my courses (Introduction to Scriptwriting) and I have decided to use one of my own ideas rather than a film or book.

A Five Finger Pitch is a layout for building your story. Each finger represents a small element and you don’t write anymore than you can fit on a finger. What you end up with are the bare bones for your story, whether it be for a script or book. This exercise has been great for me as sometimes my ideas get away from me and I can come back to the notes and not have a clue what I was thinking.

Here’s a picture so you can have some idea of what you’re suppose to do, but I wanted to elaborate more.

The first finger tells you the immediate information; genre, if it’s a book adaptation, script or book idea, feature film or TV show etc. My idea is a romance, but I don’t know if it will be a book or script yet.

The second finger is the main character. In this case it’s a career woman, a children’s author, divorced, single, with children.

The third finger is what is wanted, the goal. For my character, she just wants to do what she loves, give her children a good quality of life and be loved again.

The fourth finger is the obstacles preventing the main character from reaching their goal. In this case younger authors are coming in with fresh ideas and she suffers terribly with self doubt.

The fifth finger is what’s important/who does the story give voice to? I like to think this is a story to say, women who have children can still have a career and find love again.

I hope this helps inspire any storytellers out there, or those with an interest in story development, and let me know if you like the story idea.

The picture below is from my “study time”, with raw blueberry tartlets (a new recipe I’m working on) and a hot soya chocolate, because it’s important to get “in the zone”.