Inciting Incident, Turning Point, Dark Night Of The Soul, False Victory, Refusal To The Call… I sat at the workshop waiting to hear these phrases but there was something eerily wrong: there was no white board and marker, no projector behind us shining playful rays of text and colour onto an otherwise expressionless blank wall and no Dark Vader laser pointers. There was only more than two decades of experience embodied in a slim, spectacled fifty something year old regal beauty and understated award winning screenwriter, who was ready to let us learn from each other but most of all, throw the scriptwriting rules out of the window.

I soon realised the wealth of talent that surrounded me was enough to supply the rules of Kenya films for the next decade. We all had different strengths: structure masters, story whisperers and scene connoisseurs. The 2017 One Fine Day Films Script Brain Room participants had all the essential storytelling neurons. The problem with having so much talent in one or in our case two rooms, was to keep it focused. How was it done? The mentor’s answer was collaboration and rule breaking. These are the essential ingredients that make – The Powerpuff Girls! Sorry, I got sidetracked, I meant – FILM! It was suddenly okay to have writer’s block, sleep on the job, make a thousand mistakes or just sit and watch paint dry.

Sometimes you work on a story and hit a creative brick wall. Most of us might literally hit that brick wall to unblock but there is an alternative. At the Brain Room, it was okay to disregard the structure that you read in books in order to advance your story. It was perfectly in order to take a nap on the beds available during ‘work’ hours and regroup. Hmmm… Scribbling cartoons on my note pad… Guess what? It was also fine. In other words, we were allowed to SHIT ON ALL THE RULES if it would help to find our story.

The irony is that more work was done in two weeks than could ever be done individually in months. I left having found kindred spirits in life and will forever be thankful to every single participant because there was a drought-resistant seed of God-given talent that was planted in each of our stories.

Hey! This is a snippet. This article is already too long… And in the words of Cow and Chicken –

END!!!