Tyger Williams (MENACE II SOCIETY) explains his process of creating authentic characters, a structure that serves his story and essential info on starting your career.

Key Insights

Gain exposure to other writers’ work: you can learn just as much from bad scripts as from good scripts.
Go out into the world with curiosity. Observe real people who interest you and give you great details for writing characters.
Develop a beat sheet as your road map, but allow it to change as your characters speak to you.
Don’t judge your characters. Empathy allows you to become other characters and expand your viewpoints.
Know more information about your characters than you could ever include in the script . Fully developed characters will bring your story to life.
Play with your story. Try switching up which character’s perspective you follow.
Storytelling takes many forms across cultures - embrace the differences and find the stories that help you make sense of the world.
Write every day. Giving yourself the structure of a schedule is a great way to develop the discipline of writing and get you to a completed script.
Writing a script to completion requires a commitment as other ideas will always come along.
It helps to know your ending and focus your storytelling to earn that ending.
Staying creative is about learning, stepping outside of your comfort zone, allowing yourself to be frustrated and open to discovery.
Be critical of your work. Every idea has to stand up to the rigors of the process.
Don’t give up! Use rejection as fuel to carry on and get better as a writer.

Tyger Williams

Screenwriter

Tyger Williams is a screenwriter best known for MENACE II SOCIETY, which debuted at the Cannes Film festival as part of the Director’s Fortnight selection and went on to win an MTV Best Movie of the Year award. His other credits include THE PERFECT GUY. Williams has written over thirty screenplays for film and television and has sold original screenplays, as well as written on assignment, for all the major movie and television studios. more...

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