BPS 236: How to Outline Your Screenplay Like a Pro with Naomi Beaty

Naomi Beaty is a screenwriting teacher, screenplay consultant, and former development exec with 10+ years in the entertainment industry.

Naomi is based in Los Angeles, CA. She has worked on American productions and on projects in Taiwan and Australia, including the feature film "Ghost Boy", based on the novel by award winning Australian author Felicity Pulman, produced by Morning Starr Productions.

Earlier, Naomi worked on the other side of the desk at Madonna and Guy Oseary's Maverick Films, where she helped develop projects including "Twilight" and "Percy Jackson".

She just released her new book "The Screenplay Outline Workbook".

The Screenplay Outline Workbook is designed to give you a clear and manageable set of tools, steps, and exercises so you can turn your ideas and inspiration into an outline and write your best screenplay – whether it’s your first or your tenth.

With this workbook as your guide, you can start with just an inkling of an idea – or nothing at all, even! – and end up with a solid story premise, compelling characters, and an outline that provides a blueprint for writing an emotionally satisfying screenplay.

Inside you’ll find enough instruction and theory so that you know what you need to know, but not so much that it overwhelms you before you even get started. Room to work through your story ideas and collect your notes and flashes of brilliance. A place to organize what you discover about your story as you develop it so that you can easily reference it when needed.

Use the workbook to design a new story from scratch, or jump straight to the topic you need to get your work-in-progress unstuck. With 30+ tools, exercises, and prompts honed through years of teaching workshops and working one-on-one with writers, this workbook will help you:

Generate new story ideas
Choose a strong idea as the first step in writing a great screenplay
Build a sturdy foundation for your screenplay by finding the essential elements of the story
Discover the organic three act structure and major plot points that create the framework for the story and screenplay
Design compelling characters that help push the protagonist along a meaningful character arc
Try one or more suggested outlining methods for mapping out your story

…and so much more!

The workbook lays out a process that’s flexible enough that you can use it for every screenplay you write, yet designed to specifically address the issues readers commonly find in aspiring screenwriters’ screenplays.

With each exercise, you’ll explore ideas and make choices to build your story, piece by piece. You’ll craft an outline that does all the heavy lifting, and be confident in the story you’re telling – which frees you to get creative with characters and dialogue, and discovering the kind of magical, cinematic moments that made us all fall in love with movies in the first place.

If you’ve tried to write a screenplay before but found yourself stuck somewhere in Act 2, having an outline that serves as a map of your screenplay can make all the difference. Consider this workbook the wise but gentle guide that will meet you where you are and lead you to your destination so you can finally make real progress turning the movie in your head into a fully developed story that you’re ready to set down onto the screenplay page.

When you’re done you’ll have more than an outline — you’ll have a rock-solid foundation for your screenplay.

Please enjoy my conversation with Naomi Beaty.

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