A WRITER’S VOICE: ‘There Will Be Blood’ – Externalizing The Internal
Jacob Krueger using There Will Be Blood to demonstrate when you externalize the internal struggle, what it actually does, is it allows the movie to play in your reader’s mind while they read.
Rather than looking at the structure of There Will Be Blood we’re actually going to be looking at There Will Be Blood in terms of a concept called externalizing the internal.
So, what the heck does that mean?
We work in this really exciting medium called film. What’s the exciting thing about working in film? We tell stories with images. And the challenging thing about working in film is that half of the things that exist in the world, we can’t see. We can’t see thoughts and we can’t see feelings.
And that means, as screenwriters, our job is to externalize these internal things. To take them outside of the mind and put them into the body and the action of our screenplay. To translate the emotional language of our writing into action.
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- More articles by Jacob Krueger
- Jeanne's Screenwriting Tips: Screenplay Notes from an Emotional Read
- Balls of Steel: Character Evolution - Therapy for Your Character
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The founder of Jacob Krueger Studio, Jacob has worked with all kinds of writers, from Academy and Tony Award Winners, to young writers picking up the pen for the first time. His writing includes The Matthew Shepard Story, for which he won the Writers Guild of America Paul Selvin Award and was nominated for a Gemini Award for Best Screenplay. To follow Jacob’s blog or learn more about his Screenwriting Workshops, Online Classes, and International Retreats please visit WriteYourScreenplay.com.