Character
Assignment: While You Were Sleeping
Characters are the foundation of a good novel. This movie sets up identifiable, well-rounded characters the audience likes and wants to win. Lights! Camera! Fiction! shows how character traits guide a character's actions or inaction and demonstates how to translate characters to the page.
External Goals
Assignment: Spiderman
What drives Tobey McGuire's Peter Parker/Spiderman character? The chapter on External Goals shows how goals drive the plot and create the story.
Internal Goals and Character Growth
Assignment: Speed
Just as external goals guide the plot, internal goals motivate and drive the character. Using scenes from Speed, we see how a character changes in order to reach both his external and internal goals.
Premise
Assignment: Clueless
Trying to write a story without knowing what you want to say is like trying to go somewhere without having a destination in mind. This chapter shows how a premise keeps your story on track.
(Chapter summaries continued next page...)