Lorien McKenna (Up, Brave, Inside Out) and Meg LeFauve (Inside Out, Captain Marvel) hope you can take the Covid experience, and whatever emotion it is pulling up in you, and ‘give it to your character and give it to your story’.
‘That soft spot in you, the thing I want in the script’ is what Meg looks for as a producer. ‘It is innately, uniquely you.’ It sets you apart from the hundreds of scripts sent out to contests, managers and agents.
‘You are being brave’, said Meg, ‘and they’ll know it’. In a 90-minute tour de force packed full with writing help, consummate writers, Meg and Lorien banter honestly and frankly, back and forth, so fast it leaves you breathless, and LSWF’s interviewer, Savannah, smiling broadly.
They show us how they develop characters. They talk about Inside Out, Marvel, antiheroes, Fleabag, Pixar genius (‘their first drafts suck like everyone else’s’), finding your tribe, and asking for, and responding to notes – and more notes, and yet more notes – on draft after draft.
They remind us that the most emotional stories carry a piece of the writer in them. Things will come up as you write; and your job is to lean in, into the burning ‘lava’, as Lorien and Meg describe it. They often wrestle with their own writing just like us; they feel inadequate, annoyed, frustrated, write scenes over and over, see what they’ve painfully constructed collapse to nothing.
They rage, they curse, but ultimately buckle down, push through, get the work done. Watch this whenever your own writing seems too damned hard, and you feel you’ll never be good enough. You’ll return to your pen (or laptop or dictating device) fortified with tips and strategies (try their ‘Why?’ technique). You’ll start again; you’ll dig down, even deeper, leaning into the emotional truth you know is there, and your vocation to bring up from the pit. The pit is also the well.
Every presenter gives a final piece of advice. ‘Don’t stop,’ said Meg. ‘The world needs your stories. And if you stop, your characters are not going to come into the world. If you can’t fight to write for yourself, please fight to write for them.’
Lorien and Meg run a podcast, The Screenwriting Life. You can check it out here:
Anita Reid has happily inherited her Dad’s writing desk and tries every day to do him proud.
