The Craft of Screenwriting

[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 Final 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"] This article was taken from our vault.  If you want to know the latest classes that are offered at the studio you can see them here. For this final 2017 Screenwriting Challenge check-in, and before we get back to our regular program of breaking down movies, I want to talk about what to do with the many pages you’ve now generated, and how to keep your rhythm going once the screenwriting challenge is over. Last week, we talked about the Aum Humaniversity meditation I experienced during my retreat here in Thailand. As promised, this podcast will end with a new 12 step writing exercise, based on that meditation. As we discussed last week, great writing begins with getting your vulnerabilities out on the page-- the parts of you that you don’t normally express, the truths that you don’t normally look at, the characters that exist inside you: both the beautiful ones that you want to share with the world, and also the ones that scare or disgust you, who often represent parts of you that you don’t want to believe are possible, or that you’d never express in the outside world. That doesn’t mean that you are your characters. It means that you contain them. Some, in a form that is already integrated into your personality, and others in a form that is not integrated, or not expressed. Meditation experts talk about breath as a waveform, a symbol of the polarity of life-- the inhale and the exhale, the positive and the negative, the good and the bad, the yin and the yang, the dark and the light. And I’d like to suggest to you to think of writing as a waveform as well. In our Western society, we are taught to push out the negative, to judge it, to blame it, to feel guilty about it. But Eastern thought views it in a different way: as a natural part of that waveform, existing as a balance. To put it in a simple way: whatever you (or your characters) are expressing in the world, the opposite also exists in you (and them), in equal proportion, whether it is expressed or not. It is actually the existence of this polarity that makes structure possible. Because it is the existence of this polarity that makes change possible. Neither you nor your characters are fixed entities. You’re not just one way. We are constantly changing. Breathing in and breathing out.   Think about who you were in high school. Then think of who you are now. Think about the vast difference between those two characters. Yet we don’t think about ourselves as constantly changing. We think about ourselves as fixed entities. I am this. Or I am that. And we often think of our characters in the same way. In classic television-- if you think back to shows like Seinfeld or The Golden Girls, that was necessary. Back then, shows were distributed in a serialized form, where characters never changed. The distribution model meant that the real money was made in reruns which often came out of order. An audience needed to be able to see Episode 3 of Seinfeld and then episode 125 of Seinfeld and still feel like Jerry Seinfeld was Jerry Seinfeld. So structure had to grow from a different place-- from the situation in which you put these static characters. (That’s where the word sit-com comes from situation comedy). But if you think about most of the greatest feature films, you’ll see that the characters are not static. That they change in tremendous ways. Today, even in TV and Web Series, we’ve seen a shift to this kind of structure emerge, and with it a renaissance in television and web series writ...