Week 2, an invitation: learning while visiting the writer's room

"[As aspiring screenwriters] plan to create two screenplays a year." —Frank Wuliger

It's week two creating the new screenplay. I've been having fun teaching a colleague about screenwriting as we work on a story that we are writing into a screenplay. After four days exploring the characters (what are their flaws, who/what is the antagonist) we talked about the time period (early 80s). I said we cannot edit the protagonist to make her too nice, she's a kick-*** character. As we talked about the protagonist's character arc (need vs. want) I mentioned time period and how movies play with time.

In our improvised writer's room a different process than I've used before is taking place. In the past screenwriting as a student meant:

Getting up at 4:30 a.m. to work on screenplay pages due for class before going to work

In class, waiting for three hours for the teacher to comment on my writing for a few minutes. More was learned through mentors as they spent time teaching individually. My life changed because of these amazing teachers.

Each writing class though, was incredible as I was listening to professors as they worked with various students on many different types of stories and scenes and characters. I kept taking classes until at the end of one semester at USC a teacher in the School of Cinematic Arts told me, "You're ready to go for it."

It's so easy for the months to pass though (and Frank Wuliger tells his students that it is almost impossible for even the most gifted student to work full time and to become a screenwriter). I worked on a plan for this in his class though, and his words "well thought through," and "good plan," inspire me.

This is the first time working on a screenplay without the safety net of a classroom. I'd been afraid the octopus would arrive again in the writer's room (struggling to make it work), but students' and professors' words are coming to mind when I need them to solve problems, and my colleague is beginning to feel more confident and the collaboration is fun.

Yesterday for the first time we created our first index cards. I mentioned Irvin Kershner's frustration at my need to write down too many details at this point. He finally said, "get a marker, the biggest marker you can so that you are forced to write only two or three words on each card." 

We're following Kersh's rule as we outline broad ideas that we will move around and keep or discard to fit into the structure of the screenplay. As my friend and I worked yesterday I said, "you're hearing my mentors' words as we are working."

If our lunchtime meeting in the small glass-walled writer's room in our office were recorded you would hear me say:

• Immediately, from the first page, we have to let the audience know how we want them to feel
• We must grab the readers' attention; we need a better opening scene (and I gave examples of opening scenes from literature and film)
• On dialogue: "...You know how you say something at a party and then the next day you're kicking yourself because you've thought of the perfect thing you couldn'v e said? Our dialogue has to be 100 times beter than that."

More fun to come today, I'll continue inviting you into the writer's room. It's a creative way to learn (and I've tried many on this journey to become a screenwriter), and it has worked for me.