Screenwriters' Toolkit
Foreword
Nouvelle Séquence is a collective of modern professional screenwriters: in other words, storytellers grappling not only with the realities of the industry, but also with heat waves, climate change, and an increasingly anxiety-inducing world.
We’ve decided to do our part in the face of the fire threatening humanity. So here is this toolkit, written entirely on a volunteer basis (part of it during a heat wave), by and for screenwriters, and intended to be truly useful. We are aware that a fictional story cannot—and must not under any circumstances—be a political statement, but also that the stories we tell, whether we like it or not, are political.
This guide does not claim to create new imaginaries: it is entirely dedicated to questioning what we’re already telling—our “current imaginaries”—in order to, baby step by baby step, push back against their boundaries. To reflect on the messages we send (sometimes in spite of ourselves), the messages we don’t send, and the ones we could send.
In this toolkit—which we encourage you to read in small doses because there’s a lot to take in—you’ll find, in no particular order, controversial questions, new terms like “petrovirism” or “ambitopia,” cognitive concepts to impress your friends (kudos if you can drop “optimal prediction gap” at a party), as well as characters, settings, and other powerful, untapped narrative paths, a few inside jokes, and—we hope—plenty of enthusiasm and inspiration.
Above all, you’ll find the tools to stay in control of your stories.
Elodie Namer, screenwriter and co-founder of Nouvelle séquence
We Never Write Alone
We like to believe that stories are spaces of freedom. That characters are born from our imagination, that plots follow our intentions, and that the worlds we create belong entirely to us. And yet writing is perhaps, first and foremost, a matter of discovering everything within us that is already writing before we do.
Stories are never produced by a neutral brain. They are shaped by our memory, our habits, our emotions, our experiences — but also by social norms, industry constraints, narrative traditions and the representations already in circulation within a culture. Under the pressure of deadlines, dramaturgical demands or broadcasters' expectations, we do what all human beings do when they must decide quickly: we simplify, we categorise, we fill in missing information, we take the most readily available mental shortcuts. We write as much with our intuitions as with our convictions.
These intuitions are the product of millions of years of evolution and a lifetime of learning. Cognitive science calls them cognitive biases: shortcuts that allow the brain to save resources by quickly building a coherent picture of the world. Without them, we would be incapable of thinking, deciding, or even telling a story.
But these shortcuts have an unexpected consequence. When they repeat from one story to the next, from one film to the next, from one series to the next, they cease to be simple individual reflexes and become cultural patterns.
They end up deciding which characters seem naturally credible, which professions spontaneously embody authority, which bodies appear desirable, which social categories are shown as competent, which places become the setting for great adventures, which behaviours are rewarded and which remain invisible. Cognitive biases belong to individuals. Narrative biases belong to cultures. They emerge when the same cognitive shortcuts recur from one work to another until they produce regularities within our collective imagination — not because authors are ill-intentioned, but because they write from an imagination already populated with inherited representations. Writing is, in this sense, less an act of creation from nothing than a permanent negotiation with stories that existed before us.
The humanities and social sciences exist precisely to make these inheritances visible: sociology reminds us that what seems universal to us is often situated. Anthropology shows that what we take to be natural is frequently a historical construction. Social psychology illuminates how norms spread within a group. Cognitive science, for its part, explains why certain representations seem immediately plausible while others provoke a sense of strangeness.
None of these disciplines tells artists what they should write about. What they do allow is an understanding of why some stories seem to impose themselves almost on their own, while others seem difficult to write, even when they correspond more closely to reality.
One of the great strengths of this toolkit is precisely that it shifts the question from: How do we make an ecological film?
To: Which narrative biases make certain aspects of the world today almost impossible to tell? Why do characters so often live as though resources were infinite? Why don't scientific, popular, craft or agricultural forms of knowledge enjoy the same narrative legitimacy? Why do other species disappear almost entirely from our stories, even though they populate our everyday lives? Why does success continue to be represented by the same material symbols? Why do certain human contradictions seem immediately credible to us, while others remain unthinkable?
These questions concern ecology less than they concern the way a culture selects what deserves to be seen.
A screenplay acts less through what it states than through what it makes normal.
A heroine who takes the train without anyone remarking on it. A police superintendent who recognises the birds in his neighbourhood. A craftsperson whose know-how solves an investigation. A family that mostly cooks vegetarian meals without ever making it an issue. A heatwave that quietly changes the characters' habits. A river, an insect or a fox that exists as something other than mere set dressing.
None of these details resembles a manifesto. And yet each one helps define what appears plausible, familiar or desirable.
Cognitive science shows that we learn a great deal through observation. We imitate behaviours, but we also learn what is worth seeking, admiring or avoiding. We gradually build expectations about what counts as a successful life, a legitimate skill, a normal relationship or an imaginable future.
Stories play a full part in this learning process. They manufacture our aspirations. They teach us, often without appearing to, what an enviable life looks like, what is worth pursuing, what confers prestige, what we dream of, or what simply seems to go without saying. Desire, too, is learned. By repeatedly seeing certain forms of success tied to the same objects, the same places and the same ways of life, we come to see them as the only possible horizons.
Stories also shape our attention.
Contrary to a common belief, the brain does not perceive everything around it. It is constantly selecting the information that seems relevant to it. What is never noticed eventually becomes invisible.
Biodiversity thus disappears twice: once from ecosystems, and a second time from our attention. Characters move through cities without birds, flats without insects, landscapes without seasons, as though the living world were now no more than the occasional backdrop.
Popular knowledge meets the same fate. Repair skills, agricultural knowledge, craft expertise or everyday relationships with the natural world become peripheral, while other forms of knowledge systematically occupy the centre of the story.
Writing, then, is as much about redistributing attention as it is about telling a story. This redistribution matters all the more because fiction functions as a simulator.
We do not watch series to learn a political theory or a scientific definition. We rehearse, mentally, emotions, strategies, dilemmas, ways of inhabiting the world. We train ourselves to recognise certain situations, to anticipate their consequences, and to imagine responses.
In other words, stories enrich our library of mental experiences. They do not explicitly tell us what to think, but they train us to feel, to perceive, to decide and to act.
The most powerful stories, moreover, are neither those that entirely confirm our view of the world, nor those that seek to overturn it abruptly. They shift the boundaries of the plausible just slightly. They introduce just enough novelty to make imaginable what was not imaginable before. It is in this gap between familiarity and surprise that fiction opens up possibilities, and that a story — without brutally transforming a society — widens or narrows the field of what seems thinkable.
Without seeking to turn fiction into an instrument of persuasion, this toolkit invites writers to enrich their stories: to multiply points of view, to diversify competent characters, to shift the markers of happiness, to make visible the relationships that bind us to the living world, and to introduce new forms of desire, new skills, new ways of resolving conflict.
One of the most valuable insights from cognitive science is surely this: human beings rarely change because they are told they are wrong. They change when they manage to imagine differently — when a possibility that was once unthinkable suddenly becomes credible, when a behaviour ceases to appear exceptional and becomes familiar, when a character they identify with opens a door they had not seen before.
Fiction has a singular power to accompany this shift. Not because it persuades better than facts do, but because it works where facts alone often struggle to: in our capacity to project ourselves, to feel, to identify, and to anticipate.
Screenwriters obviously do not control the effects of their work. On their own, they cannot transform a society. But societies are also built through the accumulation of stories, characters, gestures, silent norms and repeated representations. Writers carry a responsibility that calls for neither guilt nor self-censorship — simply for a form of clear-sightedness.
To write consciously is therefore to accept that no story is neutral. Not because it necessarily carries an ideology, but because it always distributes attention, value and desire. It decides what deserves to be seen, admired, regretted or forgotten.
It is also to believe that stories have the power to push back the limits of what we consider imaginable.
And it is precisely for this reason that it remains essential to keep taking them seriously.
Samah Karaki,
PhD in cognitive neuroscience
End credits
(that we're putting at the top, otherwise no one will read it)
