As a writer, you wander in the land of fiction, fighting doubts, exploring fears, and losing yourself in the white pages of your screenplay like a hero.
Usually, you focus your studies on learning the journey of your characters.
Today, I want to talk about your own journey as a screenwriter.
A journey that is similar to the hero’s one: with its ups and downs, obstacles, challenges, and goals to achieve.
At the 2025 London Screenwriting Festival, I had the honor of interviewing screenwriter and professor Scott Myers.
Thanks to his experience as a screenwriter and as a teacher, Scott is not only an expert on the protagonist’s journey, on which he wrote a book, but he’s also an expert on the screenwriter’s journey: from the plot to the creation of the characters and their world, to how to promote yourself and protect your unique identity and your personal values.
So, in this article, you’ll learn how to:
- Avoid getting stuck and getting overwhelmed by your tornado of ideas.
- Stop limiting your imagination with self-doubt and perfectionism.
- Attract visibility, promoting your work without losing your unique personality, using the secrets that helped Scott Myers’ blog to be nominated the Best of the best Scriptwriting Website by Writer’s Digest.
In life, as in movies, every screenwriting journey starts with a burning desire.
1. Figure out your unique burning desire
Before jumping into the creation of your story, I want to start with a powerful question that Scott asked me during our interview, and which will help you to avoid feeling stuck or overwhelmed when you start working on your story.
Why do you write? What drives you to write and sacrifice your time to explore and create stories and new worlds?
What does your passion for storytelling have to do with you creating a life that is meaningful? What does the story you have in your mind have to do with who you are and your personal goals?.
I write because I need to express my inner world and because it makes me happy and adds meaning to my life, I said to Scott.
But you could write for other reasons.
There’s no right or wrong answer: you just need to have a strong reason to help you keep going even on rainy days, when you feel everything you write sucks, and your screenwriting dreams seem impossible.
When you find your “why” and answer Scott’s questions, you’ll figure out an important lesson: writing is a self-discovery, so you already have your story inside of you.
You just need to take time to put it out and share it with the world, as the sculptor Michelangelo Buonarroti did with his masterpiece.
Create your story using Michelangelo Buonarroti’s principle and avoid the writer’s block
Unlike other sculptors, the well-known Italian artist Michelangelo Buonarroti, who lived in the 1500’s, instead of adding material to create his masterpieces, he removed material, convinced that the statue was already inside the marble and his job was to find it and bring it to life.
This principle is called “the principle of subtraction”, and you can use it to gain confidence while you start developing your story idea. In fact, even though the creation process seems overwhelming, your story is already inside of you, and it will be a journey of self-discovery.
But there’s another powerful tool you can use to beat procrastination caused by the feeling of overload.
During the interview, Scott Myers shared a 3-step process to help you find your story and create your cast, and your plot.
And one of his steps, called “receptive writing”, helps you to write using your unique and authentic voice
2. Beat the overwhelming process of creating stories using the receptive writing method
“Do I need to start with characters or plot?”
“How can I create compelling characters without feeling overwhelmed?”
“There are so many archetypes to help creating my cast, where do I need to start?”.
At the London Screenwriting Festival, during Scott Myers’ Q&A, there were lots of screenwriters wanting to solve these doubts.
And that’s because creating characters, especially if you are following Carl Jung’s theories on archetypes, is an overwhelming process.
Scott Myers spotted this problem and found a solution.
In fact, he admitted: Not only are there so many archetypes that you can lose yourself in the process of figuring out how to use them in your writing, but also, I was always a bit skeptical about this topic early on and I just felt It was a sort of new age trend.
But then I found a useful approach in the arrangement of 5 primary archetypes that shape the key narrative function of each character and influence the journey of the protagonist.
So, you don’t need all the archetypes. Begin with these 5 basic roles, that you can find in Scott Myers’ book, The Protagonist’s Journey:
- The Protagonist, the main source of energy of the story around which all the other characters rotate.
- The Nemesis force, which generates conflict and drama.
- The Attractor, an ally who influences the emotional life of the protagonist.
- The Mentor, thanks to their intellectual development, the mentor guides the protagonist to a deeper self-discovery.
- The Trickster: a shapeshifter who follows their own interests, sometimes in line with the protagonist, sometimes against them. The trickster tests the will of the protagonist by shapeshifting.
As Scott Myers pointed out: Starting with only these 5 archetypes is not reducing the story. On the contrary, this method helps you to find the core reason why the protagonist exists. Screenplays are not novels, and each character has to have a function that illuminates, contrasts, or helps the protagonist to achieve their goal.
But even if this is a simple and clear process, Scott Myers shared a warning about this method:
When you are ready to start creating your story, don’t think about archetypes first. Here’s what to do, instead…
During the interview, Scott Myers showed 3 simple steps to follow when you start creating your story from scratch.
The first step is receptive writing, which involves first-hand experience with your primary resource material.
But how can you actually feel the abstract ideas and concepts you have in your mind?
Think of the receptive process in this way…
You’re like a scientist who first does experiments playing around with his materials, testing his ideas.
In a nutshell, you play around with the characters and the images you have in your mind.
Scott Myers shared different fun exercises you can do during your receptive writing phase.
First, you create a Master Brainstorming list where you’re going to jot down everything you have in your mind.
Scott’s advice is to start to observe and explore the inner and outer world of your protagonist, using different brainstorming techniques like these:
- Questioning your protagonist to figure out their mental process, their ideas, and their vision of the world: Have fun doing this by imagining, for example, that you are a detective who needs to interview your protagonist.
- Stream of consciousness to delve into your protagonist’s inner world: like meditation, find a quiet spot, set a timer, think about your protagonist, and crank out everything that hits your mind, without judging or editing what you’re writing.
- Write a “free scene” to figure out how your protagonist reacts to another character: observe what you see and hear in the scene and analyze which social mask your protagonist wears when interacting with others.
These are some of the brainstorming exercises you can use to “experience” your characters and create images of them in different situations.
As Scott Myers said: “After these exercises, hopefully your characters start popping up in your mind when you are taking a shower or you are in the queue at the grocery store. At some point in the process, you step outside, looking at your character like an audience and assess what you’ve got.”
When you have enough material to work on, you are ready to take your Master Brainstorming list and start asking reflective questions.
This part is called “reflective writing” and helps you to transform your tornado of ideas into a successful and meaningful story
During the reflective writing phase, you study your material, like a scientist who takes a step back and analyzes the results of the experiment through his microscope.
Pull together your plot and character relationships and, only at this stage, can you ask yourself reflective questions using the 5 principal archetypes.
Here are some useful questions Scott told me during our interview:
- Who’s the nemesis here? Who hinders the protagonist’s goal? As Scott pointed out: It should be pretty obvious at some point.
- Which character has an emotional connection with the protagonist? Here you have the attractor.
- Who acts according to their inner motive and then changes their shape, contrasting or helping the character? Here you have the trickster.
- Who helps the protagonist to figure out solutions and discover more about themselves? Here you have the mentor.
You can go back and forth between the receptive writing and the reflecting writing.
Once you have looked at the 5 primary archetypes, you can play around with all Carl Jung secondary archetypes, asking other questions using Scott’s examples: ‘What if my protagonist is also a Child? Or my Antagonist an Alchemist? What if my protagonist is also a warrior?’.
So far, we have discussed only character creation.
But what about the structure of your story?
When you create your characters and explore their inner world, remember that you are also working on your plot.
In fact, as Carl Jung quoted:
“The journey in the outer world is incidental to the journey in the inner world.”
3. The journey of your protagonist is the journey he NEEDS to follow
‘A story is about characters who discover who they are. It’s a self-discovery’, explained Scott Myers. ‘So, your story structure should create a journey that pushes your protagonist to reveal their true self and discover their unconscious nature.’
Take Walter White in Breaking Bad.
At the beginning of the pilot, you meet Walter White: a chemistry professor and a good family man who struggles to make ends meet.
But then, he discovers he has cancer and that’s like the “tornado” for Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz.
That terminal illness pushes Walter to become the king of a drug empire and embark on a new journey that will reveal his true nature, allow him to explore his full potential as a human being.
Not only, in his journey, Walter meets his inner shadow: Heisenberg, his nickname as a drug manufacturer.
So, why does Walter start to produce METH in an RV?
At the beginning of his journey, Walter said he did it to leave money to his family after his death.
But the truth is Walter needed to start that journey to confront his shadow and accept that he is Walter White, but he is also Heisenberg: powerful, genius, and a killer.
Prior to the cancer, Walter was just “Walter White,” and because he was neglecting half of who he really was, he lived an unhappy and dissatisfied life.
Walter White is the guy who says “yes” to everyone, and he’s meek.
Always polite. Intelligent, but also very humble.
Walter was the creator of a business, called Gray Matter Technologies. One day, he decided to sell his share to his partners for just 5 thousand dollars, thinking it was a deal for him.
Actually, it was a huge mistake.
Gray Matter Technologies became a multibillion-dollar business when Walter was already out.
A lifetime regret for him.
So, Walter has always known he has the potential to create something to be proud of. When he discovers his life is ending, he decides to go for it and becomes the person he was meant to be.
Walter needed that journey to find his social revenge and die happily.
When he gets caught by the police and Walter confronts his wife, he confesses why he started an illegal business, for which he killed and made his family suffer:
WALTER WHITE: “I didn’t do it for my family. I did it for myself. I was good at it. I enjoyed it.”
Towards the end of the series, Walter uses his dual personality to release his partner Jessie from a group of criminals and find a method to deliver his money to his family.
The deepest need of your character is going to influence the plot, their psychological journey, and their choices in the finale
In Silence of the Lambs, Clarice is an F.B.I. agent who needs to catch Buffalo Bill, a serial killer and free Catherine, one of his victims, with the help of an unusual mentor: the inmate Hannibal Lecter, a brilliant psychiatrist and a cannibalistic serial killer.
Hannibal is the mentor not only because he gives Clarice the clues to get Buffalo Bill, but also because he understands Clarice in depth and enlightens her inner world, making the audience know her better.
For example, Hannibal explains the true motivation behind Clarice’s pursuit of serial killers when she confides in him her nightmares about a childhood memory in which she wakes up in the middle of the night on her cousin’s ranch in Montana and hears lambs screaming as they are being butchered.
The lambs that Clarice tried to save that night symbolize her father, a marshal who was killed by two burglars during a robbery.
Hannibal understands Clarice’s need and shows it by asking her an important question that will anticipate the ending of the story:
HANNIBAL LECTER: “And you think if you save “poor Catherine” you could make the lambs stop screaming, don’t you?”
The answer is no.
Clarice needs to catch Buffalo Bill and get justice also for her father.
So, in the finale, when Clarice finds Catherine alive, instead of freeing her immediately, she decides to follow Buffalo Bill to slay him.
The protagonist needs a transformation process. And the core of the transformation is already within the protagonist.
Walter White was already Heisenberg.
Clarice always knew she needed to defeat the devil to restore justice in her life.
Dorothy always had the power to go home.
At the end of their transformation, they became who they really are.
This is the same for your screenwriting journey.
Your true self will begin to emerge while you write, influencing your storytelling decisions.
At this point, I had a question for Scott.
In fact, in a way, you need to write with your authentic voice, and be yourself, but at the same time you need to stick to standard screenwriting conventions and follow the rules.
So…
How can you keep your identity and still write stories that sell, following the expectations of the industry, without corrupting your uniqueness?
And how can you be influenced by other successful and amazing screenplays like Breaking Bad or the Silence of the Lambs, without losing your voice?
4. Learn from the screenwriter’s master without losing your unique voice
When I was young (and dumb), I had the idea that studying writing would have suffocated my natural voice. Fortunately, I changed that idea when I started classical studies at high school.
Besides going to lectures, studying screenwriting books or reading screenwriting articles like the ones Scott writes for his blog “Go into the Story”, he shared another powerful exercise to do to master your screenwriting skills.
If you want to write like the best, you need to analyze their screenplays and read them while you’re watching the movies, so you can also spot what part was included into the screen and what was cut.
Because I’m a huge fan of the Coen brothers’ work and I would like to write at their level, Scott talked about them and gave me an example.
In the Coen brothers’ screenplays, what is written is also filmed in the same exact way. For example, in No Country For Old Men, in the scene where the antagonist Anton Chigurh is at a gas station, there’s a close-up where the plastic bag of peanuts is uncrumpling.
That detail is in the script and is also in the movie because it adds tension and suspense.
When you notice those details, ask yourself: why did they keep this detail?
Or why did they remove it?.
Since I’ve read so many screenplays, I also questioned Scott about the process of analyzing them since occasionally I feel like I’m forgetting some of the lessons I’ve learned.
Some lessons stick easily.
Others just flow away like water on a surfboard.
Here’s what Scott Myers said to me: Don’t force the learning process. Some takeaways stick; others will come to you another time. That’s the learning process. Buddha said: “When the student is ready, the teacher will come.”
So, now you remember the lessons you need to remember. Next time, you will probably absorb other new lessons and not only in the movies you like, but also in the ones you don’t like.
The screenwriters’ journey is not linear.
Experience life.
Try new things.
Open your mind to new adventures.
Your study process doesn’t end with books.
Being a writer means opening your senses, being aware of the world full of stories.
This will help you to build your unique voice while you’re studying from the masters.
Another way to not lose yourself in your screenwriting journey is also writing what you love, that’s why I asked Scott Myers a controversial question…
Everyone says: write what you know to write the truth.
But what if you want to write about a country you don’t live in and about events you have never experienced?
Or what if you want to write about a protagonist that is not your gender?
What if you want to write about a Spanish girl dreaming of becoming the first woman on Mars, when you are British and always had bad grades in science?
Thanks to Scott Myers’ advice and his brainstorming exercises, now you can delve into the inner world of people from another culture, ethnicity or gender.
I think “write what you know” is an incorrect statement. It’s better to say: write what you know emotionally, said Scott.
Think about the sci-fi movie. Screenwriters in this genre have never visited another planet or trained to become an astronaut.
Besides their research on the subject, they write about emotions they have experienced and that are universal: like greed, abandonment, loneliness, or love.
So, if you are a man and you want to write about a woman protagonist, you can use the brainstorming exercises from Scott’s book to explore your protagonist’s inner world, even if you are not a woman.
For example, you can use the “interview exercise” from Scott’s book The Protagonist’s Journey and imagine to be a psychologist who asks your female protagonist about herself.
Another exercise is to put yourself in your protagonist’s shoes and see her going about her daily life.
Once you have your story, now it’s time to tell it to the world…
As a copywriter, I know how difficult it is to promote yourself, especially if you are an introvert, but it’s an important part of the process, because if you don’t do it, your writing will remain invisible.
So, I asked Scott for advice on how to get people interested in your writing without compromising your values.
And Scott is the best mentor on this topic because his blog “Go into the Story” was nominated the best of the best by Writers Digest, so he can give you precious advice on blogging.
5. How to attract visibility following these tips from the awarded blog expert Scott Myers
Go into the Story is a blog full of insightful lessons. It’s a rich archive that contains hours and hours of screenwriting lessons.
To achieve this result, Scott wrote consistently for years, and that’s what he advises you to do too.
I remember this girl who made it to the Blacklist, even though she didn’t have an agent at that time. It’s really hard to get your script filtered out to enough Hollywood executives to get the vote to be on the Blacklist. She succeeded because she attracted visibility thanks to her YouTube Channel about screenwriting tips. Thanks to her series, she started having connections in the industry.
You can do it too.
Instead of opposing technology, use it to your advantage to attract visibility.
With Substack and Patreon, for example, you can easily create your own blog and share your screenwriting experience with others.
Scott gave me an idea for a blog to attract attention in the industry.
If you are a newbie, you can start a blog by talking about your screenwriting journey, the lessons you are learning, and your ups and downs. Example: I’m a new screenwriter and this is my journey. Here’s an example of an article:
“I’ve watched a horror. Even if it’s not my genre, I’ve learned these lessons…”
There are lots of newbie screenwriters out there who would be interested in this type of blog.
Consider what you could write that is both original and beneficial to others.
Then you can repost your article on your social media and make new connections.
Blogging is beneficial even if you don’t get any notice from the industry, because at least you’re writing.
So, at the end, the lesson that I’ve learned interviewing Scott Myers is this:
There’s no Prince Charming in the screenwriting journey.
Nobody is coming to save you.
Nobody is coming to write or do the exercises for you.
And nobody is coming to you asking you to read your screenplay and then sell it.
It’s up to you.
You are the hero of your story, and your actions, reactions, and choices decide the rest of your journey.
I want to thank Scott Myers for having taken the time to do this special interview, even after days of lectures and answering questions at the Festival.
Scott clearly loves helping screenwriters, and his participation at the Festival made a huge difference.
If I have to choose an archetype to describe him, it will definitely be the Mentor.
If you want to meet mentors like him and ask them questions, get your exclusive ticket to the London Screenwriters Festival 2026 at an early bird special price.
Claim your spot HERE
Merging storytelling with persuasive writing, Julia is an AWAI certified direct response copywriter, using screenwriter techniques to sell even the most boring products with funny informercials, eye-grabbing magalogs, and engaging sales letters.
From selling the first 3D printer in brass, to writing for the financial industry for 8 years, Julia has chosen to follow her passion for cinema by helping businesses to become the trusted choice for screenwriters, with engaging marketing materials they can relate to.
When she’s not copywriting, Julia explores the dark abyss of humanity, creating poems and crime stories for page, and screen, “killing her darlings” as Stephen King suggests.
