Garrett Nash loves a well-written story.
He loves it so much that he decided to try his hand at screenwriting, creating a 40-page screenplay for a short film for his Grade 12 Capstone Project (see related story B1).
“I like making stories in my head, starting from nothing or something small and making it so much bigger,” the Peter Skene Ogden Secondary student said. “This is the biggest project I’ve done to date.”
Nash, who moved to 100 Mile House five years ago, said he has wanted to write books since he was a child, noting he has been inspired by books like the Hardy Boys and movies such as Ender’s Game.
His screenplay tells the story of a man named Gene who gets the cops on his tail after a dispute with his friends. While fleeing the scene, he ends up in a car crash and injures three people. The rest of the story sees Gene atoning for his actions and fixing the mistakes he’s made.
“(I was inspired) by one line from a book I read in English class, The Kite Runner,” Nash said. “It said ‘healing after the touch of death’ and I was like ‘ok, I’ll run with it’ and I just took that line and expanded on it. I visualized everything and wrote it down.”
Nash started writing his screenplay in late November, working on it through all of December before taking a break. The break allowed him to refocus and complete the screenplay by the deadline in February. There are still some pacing issues, but Nash said he is happy with it.
Although he did the bulk of the proofreading himself, his teacher, Tai St Pierre helped him with the editing.
Nash said classes he took in creative writing and television helped him with the project, which also taught him the value of planning ahead. His usual writing process consists of coming up with 10 to 15 ideas, a title page and writing out a test page before deciding what he likes best. Planning everything out made the process a lot smoother.
“When you have a skeleton of what it should be it’s much easier to put everything together on top of it rather than starting without knowing what you’re doing and gradually building up,” Nash said. “If you know what you’re doing beforehand, it’s so much easier.”
When he presented his screenplay to a judge last Wednesday he said it was difficult to describe. Unlike some of the more physical Capstone projects, his was just words on a page. Beyond taking a photo of himself typing, he couldn’t really show the progress of his work.
“Normally actions speak louder than words but I had to make words speak louder than action,” Nash said. “Mostly, I just talked a lot and went over formatting, what a title page is, the planning process and what challenges I faced.”
Nash said he intends to make writing his career. After graduation, he will study journalism at the University of Northern British Columbia in Prince George. He plans to cut his teeth writing for news stations before, one day, becoming a full-time screenwriter.
“I see journalism as a step because journalism is writing real stories but I want to focus on movie making. I want to get into directing and all of that stuff.”
patrick.davies@100milefreepress.net
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