Biscuits and Blood: the first story I ever wrote

After earning my associates degree at Guilford Technical Community College in 2019 I transferred to the University of North Carolina in Greensboro in 2020 where I majored in media studies. One of the first classes I took in my first semester was screenwriting. We only had one assignment for the whole semester and that was to write a 30 minute long screenplay. Every week we would work on part of our scripts and then go over what needed to modified to make the script a suitable end product.

Being that my greatest passion in life is to be a writer this assignment for the semester is actually what I was most excited about for the spring semester of 2020. For writing to be my life path I was very excited that I was getting a chance to stretch my legs in the craft I love so much. Not that I hadn’t previously had practice preparing for this before. During my school days growing up I had times where I had to write mini stories as well as plays that I had to reenact in first, fifth and seventh grade, but now I was getting a chance to craft a realistic story that wouldn’t just be a higher education win, but a decent career path preparation.

The idea that I came up with for my screenplay was called “Biscuits & Blood”. The plot of story was centered around a fast food restaurant getting taken over by a gun toting maniac and as the staff is covertly taken over they have to continue running their restaurant as if nothing is wrong. The idea was reality based and I came up with it from my own daily life. I worked at the restaurant Bojangles at the time I was in school and I figured it would be a great idea to come up with a story that was centered around my daily life. Crafting the setting for the story was not only easy, but fun.

When crafting the characters of the story I put together people who were composite representations of real people from my actual life. I took my best friends, former teachers, family members and even actual coworkers and used them as the templates for character development. Imagining the setting of the location was the easiest part. All I did there was just imagine my actual workspace at the actual Bojangles store that I worked at and just went from there. Even coming up with the time frame for the chain of events was easy butter. When it comes to time I love it most when a story plays over the course of just a day or less than that. I love this type of time frame in a story because it allows for so much detail to be given in such a small window of time, making for a more complex and closer look at a story.

The only challenging part of the script development process was setting it up in script format. I had previously read scripts before but never paid much attention to how they were formatted. Though it was a bit complicated at first in learning how everything should flow in script form, but after several peer evaluations and rewrites I finally made it into an exceptional product. Aside from the story itself I was most satisfied with the fact that I had learned how to write a screenplay. Film is one third of my biggest writing influences and the fact I had just learned how to write a movie only further solidified mean down my path to being a writer, as well as opened up a new writing avenue.

Three years later I am an even more experienced writer than I was when I first crafted “Biscuits & Blood”. This story has become my go-to outline for every time I write a story and if anyone ever ask I will always say that it is my most important work.