Imagination comes from your brain. Exercise it.
Warning: You don't need to know all this stuff. Don't worry if this makes your eyes peel back in your head — you can use FAST Screenplay perfectly fine without ever understanding any of what's on this page.
This information is included for those who want to understand the science behind this system, and the principles upon which it was designed. Note that modern neuroscience is currently experiencing its greatest era of discovery in recent history — so we're eager to expand this system even further as new discoveries unfold in the years ahead.
Your brain is an idea factory. Its function is to help you survive, prosper, and navigate your life. One of its greatest attributes is its ability to imagine. Our imagination enables us to reshape our world in ways that did not exist before. Imagination combines ideas and experiences to formulate new mental scenarios that are not present to the senses — you can see things in your mind that have never existed. Imagination is our greatest power, and the source of all creativity.
Creative writing (including screenwriting) is an imagination activity. Your primary tool is your brain itself. The "raw materials" of your imagination are the experiences of your life. So to write effectively (with genuine originality), it's essential to understand (or at least harness the power of) this creative idea factory sitting on your shoulders.
FAST Screenplay is built on our most up-to-date understanding of the brain, and will be continually expanded as modern neuroscience uncovers new insights and tools. Each step of FAST Screenplay is designed to exercise your brain in a way that's creatively active. Sometimes the objective will be obvious; other times it won't. By simply going through the steps one at a time, you'll experience, harness and eventually master the skills required of a professional screenwriter, as you turn your ideas into screenplays and connect with the industry.
The right-brain and the left-brain working together
The human brain has two major hemispheres, and in its natural state, the left brain is the "analytical" side, while the right brain is the "creative" side. (In truth, there are parts of both on both sides, but it's a good metaphor and largely biologically accurate.)
The challenge of writing is that it requires the effective use and integration of both sides of your brain. If you're purely analytical, your writing will lack "soul" and "depth" and "feeling". If you're purely creative, your writing will lack structure and consistency and accessibility.
Unfortunately (or fortunately), the various areas of our brains are designed to do battle with one another, so that the most effective solutions will "win out" over the less effective solutions. When you see a piece of chocolate, one part of your brain wants the pleasure of the taste, but another part wants to keep from getting fat. Whether you eat the chocolate or not is determined by which part wins that battle. But when you're unskilled at something (like writing), you don't yet have an intuitive sense of which creative choices are more effective. Should you make this creative choice or that one? Your brain battles it out, but you have no objective way to answer it, so it's easy to get lost — you have no sense of which side should win the battle.
FAST Screenplay has been designed to use each "side" of your brain when it's most effective in the process. For example, you won't criticize your work (analytical left brain) while you're blasting out a draft, and you won't do stream-of-consciousness writing (creative right-brain) when you need to determine what's wrong with your draft. As you gradually understand when in the process (and why) each gets its time, using both sides to work together becomes automatic and second-nature.
Additionally, the "whole" (big picture) goal of FAST Screenplay is to get the two sides of your brain working fluidly as one muscle. If you do the steps as designed, you'll end with a natural grasp of when to be analytical and when to be creative, and how to bounce automatically between the two.
The effect is often described as "flow" or personified as "the Muse". When you seem to create effortlessly (and know intuitively what's working and what's not), your right- and left-brain are in sync. Then, we can lock these skills into place by making it a consistent habit. In FAST, we do that by gradually increasing small challenges, which "hardwires" your brain for creativity.
‘Priming’, myelin, and the science
of learning
Inside your brain are over 200 billion neurons — about same as the number of stars in our galaxy. Each neuron has the complexity of a city, and sends electrical pulses to neighbouring neurons through connections called synapses. A single neuron can have over 10,000 of these synaptic connections. This leads to an enormous (virtually infinite) number of possible combinations — which makes every single human being intrinsically unique.
Throughout your lifetime, as you learn, knowledge and skills are imprinted across collections of neurons which form (and break) synaptic connections with one another based on the strength and importance of those connections (i.e., something that's more important or used more frequently develops stronger connections). If you read something once and quickly forget about it, the connection will be weak and may be forgotten (the connection may break). When you continually repeat an activity, the connection is strengthened when a chemical substance called myelin forms around the synaptic connections involved in that activity. Myelin forms a "protective sheath" — sort of a "hardened tunnel" — that helps to streamline the exchange of electrical pulses between neurons that communicate regularly. The electrical pulses then move faster between neurons, because the connection is stronger. The reason we get better at something the more we practice is because that myelin sheath strengthens the connection and enables us to do the same task faster and better with time.
Because each human brain is uniquely structured, we all have different perceptions of the experiences in our lives (and the different experiences inversely give us different perceptions). These differences give us different natural learning style preferences. For example, some people learn visually (via pictures), while others learn best auditorily (via sound), and others prefer kinesthetically (via touch). Throughout the steps and phases of FAST, we have carefully designed a system that incorporates all learning styles (to be further expanded as funds permit), to build habits, skills and knowledge across various sensory systems, in order to work with any brain structure.
Because the brain acquires ideas, knowledge and experiences through electrical pulses received via the physical senses (for example, when you see something, light enters your eyes and hits the photoreceptors, which convert that information to electrical pulses that get sent to the appropriate neurons), learning something as complex and creatively intricate as screenwriting (or any form of creative writing) can only be done through experience. You can't learn to write from reading a book, because until you try (and fail, and then try again) to do it physically, the neural connections are from thought only — they are merely imagination. If you read a book on screenwriting, your brain thinks it understands — but there is no physical sensory input to "lock into place" the skills, so you end up with theoretical knowledge only. Skills are developed through trial, error and correction, which shape your brain structures. They're more permanent when multiple senses are invovled (more of your brain is used, so the memory is "more important" with more references throughout your brain structure). Thought alone involves none of your physical senses. That's why FAST Screenplay will never be a book, and why it won't work if you just read the content. You have to do the steps. By doing them, you will "lock into place" the skills via experience.
One of FAST Screenplay's most powerful techniques is called "priming", where we present your brain with detail you won't master immediately. Your brain is limited in its natural processing speed, but it records and absorbs extra information "subconsciously". Then later, as your skills improve, the brain offers up solutions in unexpected moments, when the neural connections are most effective. To understand this, imagine reading 10 different ideas. You won't retain them all (only the ones that have the most "importance" to your brain), but your brain has recorded them all, and will use them to find solutions later. If you've ever had the experience of suddenly, inexplicably having a brilliant solution to a problem that has plagued you for awhile, you've experienced the phenomenon. (It's that flash of inspiration you have in the shower, when there's no pen around!) Modern neuroscience demonstrates that our subconscious brains are always working (even as we sleep), searching for solutions to ideas our conscious brains are wrestling with. By priming your brain, we fill it with the ingredients the subconscious will use when the time is right (in later steps). It has the effect of feeling like "magic". (Somewhere in the system — different for each person — you'll have a moment where something "clicks". This is where your brain makes a behind-the-scenes connection spontaneously, and it's very much built into the design of the system.)
It's not magic, though. (And it's not airy-fairy psuedoscience.) It's a very deliberate design structure that develops the skills you need as you need them throughout the process. Gradually, you overcome simple challenges that prepare you for greater challenges. Your mind is engaged in multiple ways as you simply do each step toward the completion of your project. And throughout it all, we're priming your brain to have the tools it needs when in the process it needs them.
And since we've incorporated all this into the design, all you ever have to think about is enjoying the next step. Just have fun, keep moving forward, and the results are automatic.
