ENG 313 (sec. 601, CRN 95983) Hybrid: Face-to-Face plus Online via Laulima
Summer Session I 2018 Dates/Times & Location TBA
Types of Creative Writing
The Fantastic Screenplay
WRITING INTENSIVE SECTION
Instructor: Ida Yoshinaga (ida@hawaii.edu), ABD and MA, English, UHM Creative Writing Program
DESCRIPTION:
How do you write a fantastic screenplay? Structure a stylized story arc to distinguish a HORROR script from a normal tragedy? Deploy iconographies of alien-ness, cognition, and science, to distinguish your SCIENCE-FICTION script from a typical tale about humans using technology? Draw upon mythical or fairy-tale logic to set apart your URBAN-FANTASY script from other city-set stories about people’s corruption, abuse, crime? In other words, what writing craft might you call upon, to marshal story structure, thematic motifs, and audience expectations, when grafting fantastic-genre conventions onto the screenplay form? How do you, as a new screenwriter, capture spectacle, wonder, disruption, curiosity, terror, and magic?
We will attempt to answer these questions, as we write and revise 3 fantastic-genre scripts of various lengths, and pitch one of them as a film project. As creative writers, we’ll study the historically troubled, highly gendered, often colonialistic form of fantastic screenplays, paying special attention to how movies and other audio-visual narratives use fantastic storytelling modes to depict issues of gender-sexuality, race-indigeneity, social class, globalization, religion-spirituality, and regional community. In the process, we’ll ask two questions: What are the political stakes of expressing ourselves in the fantasy genre, and how do we as scripters critically depict a fantastic imagination, as portrayed via the screenplay form?
GRADING REQUIREMENTS:
3 scripts [1 of 2-3 double-spaced pages (10%); 1 of 4-6 double-spaced pages (20%); 1 of 8-15 double-spaced pages (30%)]; 1 PowerPoint presentation (15-20 slides) with a related, informal, oral pitch (15 minutes) [combined 20%]; online, weekly, writing exercises leading up to the scripts (via Laulima) [15%]; regular classroom participation [5%]
REQUIRED TEXTS:
– Trottier, David. The Screenwriter’s Bible [6th Edition]: The Complete Guide to Writing, Formulating, and Selling Your Script. Silman-James Press, 2014. ISBN 978-1935247104.
– Access to Laulima course website where the Resources folder will contain URLs and PDFs for accessing other readings about fantastic storytelling and cinema.
– Access to Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, or another streaming or DVD/Blu-Ray purchasing service, that allows viewing of various fantasy, science fiction, horror, and fairy tale films and other fantastic texts, titles TBA.
About the Instructor
Ida Yoshinaga is a Ph.D. student in the Department of English who specializes in screenwriting studies, feminist film theory, and decolonial approaches to the fantastic genre. She won the Abernethy Award, the top creative award in the UHM Creative Writing Program; the Walter James Miller Award for Scholarship in the International Fantastic from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts; and the R.D. Mullen Fellowship of Science Fiction Studies journal.