ENG 313 Hybrid: Face-to-Face plus Online via Laulima
Spring 2018: 01/08-05/02/18 (CRN 85968, Section 07)
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.
– David Butler, Fantasy Cinema: Impossible Worlds Onscreen, Short Cuts series, Wallflower Press, 2010. ISBN 978-1906660161.
– 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.