The Second Challenge Check-In!

[spb_text_block title="PODCAST - Second Challenge Check-In" pb_margin_bottom="no" pb_border_bottom="no" width="1/1" el_position="first last"] The Second Challenge Check-In! By Jacob Krueger [/spb_text_block] [divider type="standard" text="Go to top" full_width="no" width="1/1" el_position="first last"] [spb_text_block title="The 2017 Screenwriting Challenge!" pb_margin_bottom="no" pb_border_bottom="no" width="1/1" el_position="first last"]   Greetings from Thailand! You can probably hear the sounds of the jungle and of rushing water around me. It’s been raining here for the last 12 days, and pretty much every path has turned into a river. Nevertheless, it’s been a pretty magical experience. As many of you know in addition to my own little writing retreat, I’ve been here for the last couple of weeks studying yoga and meditation. And I recently participated in a life-changing meditation, created by AUM Humaniversity, that I wanted to share with you with this 2017 Screenwriting Challenge check-in. The meditation was nearly three hours long—12 stages of 12 minutes each. And each stage focused on experiencing an emotion that is normally feared or repressed. It occurred to me, of course, that this is a lot like writing. Writing takes courage. It takes a willingness to look inside that most people do not have. And even more courageous, it takes a willingness to look inside ourselves and put what we find there on the page—even the parts of us that we don’t very much like, the parts that make us feel exposed, or vulnerable, or weak, or unacceptable. There’s a myth about writers that we are in the fiction business. But actually the opposite is true. We are in the business of telling the truth through fiction: the emotional truth of our experience. As those of you who have taken my Write Your Screenplay class or Jess’s Meditative Writing class know, writing is like a dance between these two parts of your mind: the part that wants to create something that others will understand, and the part that has something it desperately needs to say. Something that may or may not be socially acceptable. Something that may or may not fit your career goals or your plans for your story. Something that may or may not be in a form that others will understand. This is where our characters come from. Not from an idea, not from a formula, not from what your conscious mind thinks is necessary for your story. But from somewhere deep inside. Somewhere we don’t normally access.   Your characters are simply a part of you that you don’t normally show to the world.   Jung called this idea the collective unconscious. His belief was that in our daily lives, we only experienced a very tiny bit of the universe—a very tiny bit of who we really are. But in our dreams, he believed, we could tap into the full universe that already existed within us. Not an individual experience, but a collective one—the metaphors we all share. The things that make our stories universal. In other words, he believed that the whole universe already existed inside of you. That every script you’ll ever write, every character you’ll ever create, every line of dialogue. Every possibility. It’s all there, in this part of your mind you don’t normally go to in your waking life.   I remember when I was first starting out as a writer, how much work it was to write.   I remember listening to famous writers talk about how they saw themselves not so much like a writer as like a scribe, that they weren’t actually “doing the writing,” but rather simply transcribing what their inner writer, their muse, their instincts—choose your word for it—simply transcribing what that force inside them was telling them. I remember thinking, what a bunch of horse shit. I didn’t have a muse like that. If I want to create something, I sat down and wrestled with it, and forced it into the shape I wanted it to take. Then I was lucky enough to study with a brilliant writer named Peter Parnell. At the time, Peter was a starving playwright, though he went on to become one of the biggest writers in Television. And what Peter taught me was that writing didn’t have to be so much work. That the answers I was looking for were not in some formulaic book, or even in my own conscious mind. That they already existed in my subconscious mind.   And the work of a great teacher was not to teach me “how to write,” but to teach me how to access what was already there.   Many people would say that Peter taught me how to find my voice. But actually he did so much more. He taught me how to find not only my voice, but also the entire structure of the story I wanted to tell. How to stop wrestling with my characters and start listening to them. How to stop puppeteering them through the twists and turns of some predetermined plot, and instead start letting them lead. And most importantly, how to stop manipulating the feelings of my audience, and turn writing into a process where I actually experienced the emotions myself. When I made the move from playwriting to screenwriting, I took Peter’s teachings with me. But I also ran into a problem.  Screenplays were so much bigger than plays. They had so many moving parts. Plays have something called unity of place. They all take place on one stage, and usually in one or just a handful of locations. And the scenes go very long. Most of the action happens through dialogue, so it’s really easy to dive deep within a very simple structure. Movies, on the other hand, have much shorter scenes. And they have a lot of them.  In just a couple of pages, you can jump to 10 different locations and many different storylines. And most of the action happens in action, which means you don’t get to linger in any scene for very long. Everything is always moving, moving, moving! You end up with so many moving parts, that you can’t hold them all in your head at one time. It’s easy to lose track, not only of where you’re going, but also where you’ve been.  It’s easy for all those parts to get jumbled together. To answer this problem, I did the same thing everybody does. I started reading screenwriting books. Screenplay by Syd Field. The Hero With a Thousand Faces, by Campbell… and many others, all suggesting a different answer to this fundamental problem of structure. But, no matter what approach I took, I found myself returning to the same bad habits-- once again manipulating my characters through the structural architecture I’d built for them rather than allowing them to exist as real people in the universe.  Thinking with the conscious part of my mind-- what I wanted my audience to experience-- rather than the subconscious part—what my characters were experiencing, what I was actually seeing, feeling or hearing when I went inside and watched them.   I was writing with the conscious brain rather than the subconscious one. The editing brain rather than the writing brain.   And what I found was that while my writing did become clearer it also became totally boring. People were no longer quibbling with my structure. But they also weren’t moved.   I had turned myself into the worst kind of bad writer. The kind of writer who wants an emotional reaction from his audience, but is shut off from the emotions in himself. The kind of writer whose obsession with craft becomes so all encompassing that he loses track of his art. This not only took away the magic of the final product. It also took away the magic of the journey by which I reached that product. It took away the magic of writing. So I thought back to what Peter Parnell had taught me, and I realized that all these “principles” that seemed so important in all these screenwriting books had never even been a part of the conversation. Then I started researching the people whose books I was reading. And what I found was that unlike Peter, most of them weren’t actually screenwriters at all.   Most of them had never even sold a screenplay.   Later, I’d come to understand that there’s a very simple reason for this. Unlike playwrights, who are all starving, successful screenwriters make money. Want so study with your favorite playwright? Guaranteed they’re teaching somewhere. But successful screenwriters don’t have to teach. And even those who love teaching, or who have reached a point in their career where they are ready to give back, are rarely writing screenwriting books, and rarely teaching at Universities, where Phd’s (which very few screenwriters have), are often so much more valued than experience.  It’s simply a matter of numbers—to write a screenwriting book, you’ve got to desperately want to do it. Because you could spend a third of the time writing a screenplay, and end up with ten times as much money. I realized at that point why I was having trouble. I knew I was a talented young writer .  But I wasn’t learning screenwriting from writers. I was learning from critics and academics, people who had been trained to analyze and deconstruct a finished product. Not how to create one from the blank page. And suddenly things made sense. This kind of outside-in approach could teach me how to look at a great screenplay academically once I’d finished it.  But they couldn’t teach me how to put it on the page.   I knew I needed to get back to the approach Peter had taught me. And at the same time, I knew I couldn’t simply write a screenplay as if it were a play.   I needed an approach that would help me make sense of all these disparate visual pieces—that would help me organize and shape the creations of my subconscious mind into a structure that I and others could understand—to dip subconsciously into the collective unconscious, and then find a way to come back outside and create structural value for what I found there. That’s how I created the 7 Act Structure that I now teach in my Write Your Screenplay classes.