Happy Friday!

I admit that it’s been hell trying to find a good day to publish my blogs consistently. So… I’m going to try to out Fridays for a while to see if they work better for my schedule. Sorry for bouncing around so much! I’m hoping that this is a good day for writing about writing is almost as good as actually writing.

And I thought that I’d mention that I’m starting to write some posts for MY APOCALYPTIC THANKSGIVING the feature film. My first blog discusses why I decided to become a producer on that wonderful film. Enjoy!

Here’s the scoop… I had a wonderful insight about writing that I long fought for a silly reason if I’m honest with myself. It’s that I long resisted picturing actors playing my different characters. And I’d picture actors at a younger age or older age than their actual age if I was forced to do so. This means that I still didn’t truly have to picture anyone seriously.

My logic was that I didn’t want to have it hamper my creativity. I wanted my characters to “speak” to me in a way that let me knows their story. The reason is that I was afraid that thinking of a specific actor will hamstring me for s/he will limit what I could do with my characters. It’s true that I thought that that would censor my stories in a way that would undermine them instead of helping them.

But it was in going through the Creative Lab twice that helped me to start to challenge this idea. Their process is to have you write for two specific actors for your short film produced in their program. I was also given the chance to meet my actors and see them act before I wrote my pages. Plus, I gave my actors the chance to give me input on the characters and their storylines. This experience turned out to be far more helpful than I ever imagined.

It was that I had something solid to work with when building my pages. I didn’t have to worry about starting from scratch like my other original concepts. We had all also agreed on certain kinds of characters and their storylines. As a result, I was able to blast out my pages quickly. Their end result came out much closer than I had originally imagined that they would.

And all my actors gave wonderful performances. This was even when I wrote things that I thought that would have challenged them. They all went for it. My instructions were also clear enough on the page that my directors were able to translate my words into short films.

It’s actually that last line that got me to rethink my desire to not write to actors in my scripts: scripts are meant to be movies rather than just remain written words like in other forms of writing. This means that writing to a specific actor makes my writing easier to picture in a finished film.

Isn’t that really the point?

Have a great Friday!

• writing