It’s easy to make a gratitude list full of other people! The family and friends around your Thanksgiving table. A teacher who encouraged you. The friend who reads your pages. The writer whose work reminded you why you wanted to do this in the first place.
This year, put yourself on your thank-you list.
Your strange interests. Your sense of humor. The things you notice that everyone else walks past. The questions you keep asking, even when the people around you are ready to change the subject. Your special interests and obsessions.
All of that belongs in your writing.
Of course you can learn from other writers. Read their scripts. Study how they build tension, introduce a character, or make an ordinary conversation unbearable. Try their techniques. Experiment with their rhythms. Following someone else’s style can help you discover what excites you about writing.
Then bring yourself into it. What would you notice? What would you find funny, or frightening, or worth staying up late to figure out? As indie filmmaker Mark Duplass famously noted in an online crowdfunding pitch, the best stories come from asking yourself, "What is the secret that you would never tell anyone, except for that one friend at 3 a.m. after you've had a few drinks?"
Only you can tell your story your way. And that starts with choices much smaller than an entire story.
It starts with a sentence.
We spend a lot of time talking about screenplay structure: inciting incidents, act breaks, midpoints, endings. But we can get pretty far into learning screenwriting without spending much time on how to build a clear action sentence.
So let’s go back to a fun writing tool:
Subject + verb + object.
June hides the cake.
| Subject | Verb | Object |
|---|---|---|
| June | hides | the cake |
Someone acts. Something happens. We can picture it.
That simple structure helps a reader move through a scene without stopping to untangle who’s doing what. It also gives you three places to make a choice: who acts, what they do, and what they act on.
June hides the cake.
June torches the cake.
June weighs every slice of cake.
Same character. Same general object. Very different possibilities.
Now add a specific detail:
June hides the birthday cake in the washing machine.
Suddenly, there’s a question. Why there? Who might find it? Is this a surprise party, a household emergency, or a terrible place to store buttercream?
You’re building a world through an action. We learn something about this particular household because someone does something specific in it.
Try another:
June scrapes birthday frosting off an eviction notice.
A celebration and financial pressure occupy the same image. You’ve given us something to see, something an actor can do, and a reason to wonder what’s happening in June’s life.
This is where clarity and originality work together. A clear sentence lets the unusual detail land.
When you’re writing action, look for a person or thing that can do something. Choose a verb that gives the action its character. Choose an object that belongs to this particular world. A character clutching a receipt gives us a different image from a character shredding it.
Present-tense action. Concrete details. Words that help us see and hear the scene.
Fragments, long sentences, and unusual rhythms all have their place, too. Subject-verb-object is a useful foundation to return to when a paragraph feels muddy. Once the reader can follow the action, you have room to play with how you tell it.
And please, play. Throw a party with your writing. Your audience is literally begging you to have fun.
Get weird. Follow the detail you almost cut because you thought nobody else would care. Give the character your very particular opinion about how a birthday cake should be sliced. Write the scene that makes you laugh before you know whether anyone else will.
Your taste helps you choose what belongs on the page. Your curiosity helps you find out what happens next. Your experience helps you recognize the gesture, object, or sound that makes a moment feel true.
Those choices accumulate. A voice emerges.
So here’s a small writing invitation: choose a place you know well and put a character inside it. Write three clear action sentences using subject, verb, and object. Give each sentence one detail that makes the place specific.
Then follow whichever detail interests you most. Let it cause a problem. Let the character do something surprising with it. See how far you can go while keeping the action clear.
What story do you want to tell? What keeps catching your attention? What have you been waiting for permission to put on the page?
Be thankful for who you are. Give that person some room to write.
At this month’s Free Typewriter Party, we’ll get into writing details that come from our brain and our brain only, and that’s something to be thankful for!
