Top 10 ways to improve your story for your Twisted50 final draft
22 July 2024 · 2 min read
By no means a defnitive list, but a great start. What are your thoughts?
Read more of the stories, to get more reviews on your own stories.
The more you help other people by reading their stories, the more they’re inclined to help you by reading yours. Feedback is at the heart of Twisted50.
Engage in conversation.
When you get feedback, respond to it and ask for clarification for points that you agree with and disagree with, so that you can further understand how your story is landing with readers. You may also make new writer friends!
Strengthen your premise.
Zero in on the spine of your story, the beating heart, and figure out how to make it more original, possibly more shocking, harrowing, and horrifying. I would always argue for making it more melancholic too. Horror has an inherent tragedy and sadness inside it.
Start later in the story.
Consider jumping into your story a paragraph or three later to elevate the pace. You may be surprised. Consider opening on the ending to, then jumping back in time. See what happens. Unless you have a clever twist, we can most likely predict an ending, so the journey to the end is what matters most. Take people deeper at the start so the journey is inherently deeper and darker.
Make the opening deliciously twisted.
The very first sentence should be evocative, terrifying and grab the audience by the throat. It should let them know they are about to be dragged into hell (which of course they want). Use deliciously twisted language that makes us all shudder and shiver.
Turn a phrase.
Revisit your common turns of phrase and elevate them, reinvent them, re-imagine them, even make them quirkier. Ask others to point out where you may be using ‘vanilla’ turns of phrase.
Reduce, refine, reduce, refine.
Every story that has ever been sent to us has needed some editing. Read it through and get aggressive with the editing. Make it shorter. It will read better.
Find the trope below the cliché and re-imagine.
Understand the tropes in your story and then, if you have any clichés expressing these tropes, re-imagine the clichés in new and unique ways. Nothing wrong with a functionally cliché in draft one, but re-imagine it for draft 2.
Spellos, grammar, and punctuation.
Re-read your story, put it through spell checkers, and tools like Grammarly. Correct any and all errors you find.
Don’t resubmit too early.
Utilize the value of having your story read by as many people as possible and engage with the conversation BEFORE sending in draft 2. Remember, once you send in draft2, there’s no impetus to continue to leave feedback. As you submission is now locked.
Written by
Chris JonesPassionate about all things film, I have spent my life watching movies, making movies and helping others make their movies too. Most recently I have been directing Splinter Unit on 'Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning', parts 1 and 2 for Paramount. I also executive-produced 'The Enfield Poltergeist' for Apple TV+. Deeper into my past, my early major projects include action thriller 'The Runner', serial killer thriller 'White Angel' and paranormal horror 'Urban Ghost Story'. I co-created and authored The Guerilla Film Makers Handbook series, published by Bloomsbury. There are now eight books in the series. More recently I have run a series of London-based festivals, kicking off with the London Screenwriters Festival which attracts over 1,000 professional screenwriters from around the globe annually. I also set up and run TEDxEaling, an annual TEDx conference on storytelling and human communication. In 2009, I made the multi-award-winning and Oscar-shortlisted 'Gone Fishing', the whole process being heavily documented on my blog. In 2014 I completed my fourth feature film, the crowd-created 50 Kisses which entered the Guinness Book Of Records for most screenwriters on a feature film. Following this success, I founded Create50 to continue the idea of crowd-created projects. Twisted50, our first book, was published on Halloween 2016 and immediately toppled Stephen King from the top spot on Amazon. Five books have followed in the Twisted50 series and we are working on the sixth now. During the summer of 2016 I trained to become a master Firewalk instructor and now regularly take people across the hot coals for charity. Late 2017 I directed the short film 'Seeing Him' which collected a ton of awards too. Over the following years I continued to make award-winning shorts, such as Meet The Nativity and Never Too Late. In the summer of 2022 I premiered Impact 50, the second feature-length movie from Create50. This time I directed the segment at the start of the film, with Olivia Williams as the President, and written by Joe Eszterhas. In the summer of 2022, I also joined the Mission: Impossible 7 and 8 productions as Splinter Unit director. At Halloween 2023, the Apple TV+ show that I co-executive-produced, 'The Enfield Poltergeist', premiered. I run regular filmmaking workshops for filmmakers both online and in person. Some people ask how I began making films? Like most filmmakers of my generation, it was with a Super 8mm camera, summertime and school friends, usually after watching a behind-the-scenes TV programme on a Hollywood movie like Star Wars. My first film was a zombie horror called Necronomicon, heavily influenced by John Carpenter's The Fog. And I was hooked for life. Contact me at Ealing Film Studios, Ealing Green, London, W5 5EP, UK
