Writing story in a way that is unique to ourselves and true to the viewer can be the key to reaching our full potential as a writer. Longtime studio executive and now acclaimed story/career consultant Jen Grisanti came along to the London Screenwriters’ Festival to help us to understand what our writer’s voice is and how to use it to inform the work we produce.
In Jen’s experience, writers who learn to connect with their voice go right up the career chain, so what is a writer’s voice? Your voice, she says, is your worldview, the things that have shaped your life to make you think and feel a certain way, a way that can influence how you approach and tell a story. It’s what sets you apart from the masses. Learning how to draw from our own stories in order to write in the way only we can write can bring connection and fulfilment to our work.
In each of our lives there are defining moments that changed who we became as people and coloured our view of the world. Those moments not only turned us toward new paths in life, but have tremendous value to our journey as a writer, becoming emotional gold. Jen tells us that one of the first things producers will consider is why you are the best writer to tell this story. Her own story has influenced her career path and made her happier and even more successful in her work and her life. For the writer’s shes worked with since beginning her consultancy in 2008 much success has manifested too, seventy-five of her writers have staffed on TV shows and forty have sold pilots, five of which have gone to series.
There is often a universal connection between our own defining world views and that of our audience. For instance, in the TV show Mr. Robot, however we feel about hackers or mental health, everything the character dislikes in the world are the things we dislike and that is our route into connecting with the drama, through the writer’s expression of those feelings. Transparent writer Jill Soloway drew on her own life experience to pen the runaway Amazon hit that is about living your own truth no matter what. At the beginning of Homeland, the eight missing years of a soldier’s life and the mystery of what really happend is the bedrock of the drama, and though Birdman is about an actor’s struggle with fame what really underpins the story is really about a father who lost an important life moment by concentrating on filming it instead of being present as his daughter is born. The whole film deals with that longing to retrieve something that has been lost. Guardians of the Galaxy is about the desire for a family and the family we choose. These underlying voices of the writers are what connect us to the main plot as we invest in the characters needs and desires.
If we think about the main components of a story, the choices made in the dilemma of the story define the external goal. Understand what your character wants internally that is opposed to that external goal. The obstacles in the story should link to the goal in some way to raise the stakes and force a resolution. In writing we must understand what connects us to a story and what our own story adds to the narrative, the perspective we bring. Looking for our own emotional moments that resonate with our character’s personal moments even if the circumstances differ. What is it that our own universal life moments make us want to say. Developing a strong personal narrative is about being able to tell executives in a meeting our personal story and the reasons we’re the writer they need. When executives see twenty writers a day it’s the ones who they feel personally connect to a project and have something to add that they remember when the time comes to hire.
Leilani is an actor, screenwriter and filmmaker and has been blogging for the London Screenwriters’ Festival since it’s inception in 2010.
