How To Use The Holidays To Create More Inner Conflict

The holidays always cause us to reflect about the state of our lives, what happened during the past year, where we were and whom we were with on previous holidays, regrets and victories.

Films borrow the idea of comparison for very good effect. In The film, When Harry Met Sally, the start of the friendship and making the commitment to become life partners occurs on two New Year's evenings, a year apart. Recently, a dear friend of mine broke up with his life partner of eleven years. What was he most upset about? Not that the guy cheated on him for a year, not that he was dumped three days from their tenth year anniversary, but rather that the break up occurred was a week before Thanksgiving! This made him extraordinarily bitter and angry, and it occurred to me, after I attempted to comfort my friend, that this was a way to inject more conflict into any script I was working on.

The example of the use of New Year's Eve in When Harry Met Sally should be clear: It's not JUST that Harry has to decide if he wants to spend his life with Sally, it’s that it's a new year, and the symbolic choice feels more profound. In my friend's case, it was a final example of his partner's utter selfishness.

Here's the exercise:

1. Take a powerful personal event from your current script, such as a break up or a death.
2. Connect it with a holiday such as Christmas or New Year's.
3. Consider how connecting the event with the holiday can create more inner conflict for your characters.
4. Set a timer for 10 minutes.
5. Writing as if you were a major character, "talk" about what the proximity to the holiday meant to "you." For example, if you were Harry: "It wasn't just the rest of my life, it was that it would begin or end on New Year's Eve."
6. Repeat the exercise from the other character's point of view. For example, if your film were When Harry Met Sally, do the first part of the exercise for Harry, and the second part for Sally.

Good luck and Happy Holidays!

About Marilyn Horowitz

Marilyn Horowitz, the president of ArtMar Productions and creator of The Horowitz System®, a revolutionary visual writing system, is an award-winning New York University professor, a producer, a screenwriter, and a New York-based writing coach who works with bestselling novelists, produced screenwriters, and award-winning filmmakers. She is the author of five books, including How to Write a Screenplay in 10 Weeks and The Four Magic Questions of Screenwriting.