Just a story: Framing trauma within screenwriting practice.

Abstract

This article examines the evolution of a screenplay and short film that developed as a creative response to a traumatic encounter with a child, and how the initial trauma resonated through the entire development process. This autoethnographic account will frame the initial encounter, the creative translation of that encounter into a screenplay and the subsequent life and ramifications of that screenplay and the relationships surrounding it. Moving beyond the encounter that spawned the screenplay, I intend to explore a directly related event that produced a similar response in me. The recognition and admission of this repeated response provided an insight in terms of my own awareness and responses to conflict and provides the foundations for my argument. That is, to consider and evaluate ideas surrounding the perceived or romanticized therapeutic value of creative practice. What I argue is that communication of an event is all that can be offered at the point of creativity. The deeper work of unpacking and processing events and responses is not in my experience inherent to the creative practice process.