I’m a Ghanaian-Scottish female screenwriter, currently making shorts but also working towards writing for TV. In studying the craft of screenwriting, what is immediately clear is a good story alone is not enough, it must be effectively told. Structure is a chisel and the story is marble; the writer is the skilled artist that must make a beautiful statue. What we like to call “talent” is really just “honing skills through hard work”.

With this basic storytelling knowledge established, the question is why are stories so important to us?

Stories are not just a way to process our world, they are the way we impose order on our world. The order of our own perspective. Once that clicked for me, a lot of the arbitrary way society functions made sense. Systems of oppression like white supremacy and misogyny stand to this day because of stories passed down to us that we have generally believed without question. We are just now starting to unlearn a lot of toxicity and the work is hard!