Screenwriting Tricks of The Hunger Games - to help you write your book!

#screenwriting101 #screenwritingtips #authortube
Your favorite books and movies are your best writing teachers. And watching movies, looking for the simple structure pattern that is the basis of ALL movies—and most successful books— is the fastest, easiest way to learn how to write better books and scripts. Let’s see how this pattern works in THE HUNGER GAMES.

Get the workbooks:


Sequence One is the first fifteen minutes of a movie (approximately!), and that corresponds to about the first 50 pages of a 400-page book.

Sequence One tends to be about the Introduction of the Hero or Heroine in their ORDINARY WORLD. We learn their SPECIAL SKILLS, their GHOST or WOUND, and what they think they want (DESIRE) which is often different from what they really NEED. And by the end of Sequence One there will usually be an INCITING INCIDENT, or CALL TO ADVENTURE, that focuses the Heroine’s Desire and compels them to leave their ordinary world and go off into a SPECIAL WORLD to win that Desire. Many stories also have a MENTOR figure; in THE HUNGER GAMES, there are more than one!


We will also often be introduced to the ANTAGONIST or Villain, the opposing force, in Sequence One. There are usually multiple FORCES OF ANTAGONISM, as we will see very clearly in THE HUNGER GAMES.

These videos are excerpts from the Screenwriting Tricks for Authors workshop, © Alexandra Sokoloff

[woodlandlady]

Thank you for simplifying the first act sequence.

[Patrick-mgvv]

Subscribed. Thanks Alexandra, your books are great.