Copy the Masters (First!)

I've been taking a screenwriting class where the main exercise has been to copy brilliant scripts that have already been made into award-winning films and TV shows.

Page by page, word for word, type the exact dialogue, action lines, character descriptions.

When the teacher mentioned this I immediately thought "ah ha!" Why didn't I think of that? 

I've done it in so many other formats. Studying novels to refine my writing. Learning cover songs to understand melody and harmony and rhythm. Rehearsing salsa shines until the basic patterns are ingrained. 

Artists used to learn through apprenticeship. Taking time to perfect the style of the masters who came before. It's the best way to know how to break those rules. 

You have to know what the structure of your medium is, before you can figure out how your unique voice will shine in it.

Come check out the Hot Mess series on TikTok, and watch as I lose my mind - and find it again - writing, producing, and acting in a show!

#CreatingIsHealing🦋

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hi my friends. I am having one of those days where I am just sitting here convinced this is gonna be a terrible episode and I have no idea what I'm saying. And, um, trying to convince myself I know what I'm doing and finally just decided to hit record. And, um, so kind of, you know, so much of this podcast. Well, it's funny, I don't think it's what it started when I had the title, but it still applies. Um, be Your Own Muse, uh, you know, was about really turning inward and letting yourself be the reason you create, you know, rather than this external idea of someone else inspiring you. I think everything can inspire you, but there's such a gendered idea behind a muse. And especially as an actor, I always felt this sense of loss of agency. Like my goal was to make someone think that I was, you know, the reason for making an entire film, which I love as an idea, but I don't know, I, I, I wanted to figure out, because I was so, um, struck by how much agency I kept giving away that it was actually leeching all of my creativity. Because I was always trying to figure out, well, whose muse am I supposed to be and how do I get them to discover me and how do I figure out what they want and what they're looking for? And it's the worst way to go through any kind of life. And so I've been forever looking for this internal compass, this internal, not even motivation. I feel a lot like when I was younger I had such a clear sense of who I was and why I did things. And it bothered me much less that people thought I was weird or could kind of hear my own internal systems more. And the more I grew up, the more I kind of got scared of that. And it didn't seem definitely not cool, but not even like functional or normal. So I got really good at kind of not listening to my internal orientation and taking cues from the outside to, which is really good for surviving middle school and high school and college depending on where you went to school. Um, but not a way that I wanna live my life. And I think anyone who's an artist hears their internal compass, their internal voice or guidance way more than the external. And that's why they wanna create, it's an expression of you, right, of the divine of the energy, the that flows through you. And so that was the idea behind this, right? How do you turn inward for your inspiration? Um, and let that be your guiding force. But the other thing that's happened in this podcast, which I'm actually really proud of, um, terrifying as it is, has been a really pullback whew. And look at the messy middle, you know, and look at the, I don't know, in this age of Instagram, we just see so much of the after product of how things are when they are done and when they are finished. And

Speaker 2: 2:59

We don't get to watch someone be terrified and do it anyway. We don't get to watch someone or even like, hear their thoughts, you know? And people will sometimes share that, which I love when they're like, oh, I did this thing and I looked really polished cuz someone did my hair and makeup. I had a glam squad, but I was shaking on the inside, you know? Um, and it's so hard. It's funny when I hear people say that, I always think, oh yeah, uh, that makes sense. But I, because I can't feel like their outsides look so different from the, uh, insides that I feel that it's hard for me to relate that my shaking and my panic and my voice is telling me I suck and this will be terrible, are similar to someone who I really respect and admire having the same voices, right? So I think part of it is just normalizing the fact that our brains are always going to tell us we suck and this is a terrible idea and you should not do this. Um, and for myself, just normalizing that, showing up when I'm exhausted and my brain doesn't feel fully online, and, um, and yet I really care about showing up for this podcast. So I'm choosing to show up anyway, not even what I came here to talk about. Um, I wanted to talk about, I signed up for this class that I'm really, really loving called Script Shaq, this teacher named Carol Seagers. Um, I, I don't know if he's out of Australia or Austria, I should really know this, but I do believe he worked in European film markets for a long time and is a writer and did acquisitions and re and a producer and really understands what sells in a script. And what I love about his program is that he has us taking pa pages from published scripts, from scripts that were turned into films that were really successful and worked really well and just copying exactly what's on the page. And it's funny because this feels mind blowing to me, but then as I've been thinking about it, I'm like, oh, I've been doing a similar thing in other art forms for a very long time. I just never thought to do it in screenwriting. And, and the reason he has his do this is the same reason Picasso talked about, you know, he learned all of the painting techniques that came before him and experimented with all these different phases before he threw out all the rules and came up with his own. The way that we really learn how something works is by copying our predecessors. There's a lot of, um, novelists or writing teachers who tell you to like, hand write someone else's novel. And it sounds kind of weird, but it's actually because there's a rhythm to writing and there's a pacing to it and there's a way that sentences make sense and structure makes sense, um, that you learn just by creating a muscle memory for it. And so what I'm loving about Script Shack is first of all, there's a real, um, range of things. He's got us looking at some of its tv, some of it is film, some of it is action movies, some of it is drama, comedy, um, really, really different things. And, and I realize I like that cause I wouldn't necessarily write an action film, but learning how, how a really good writer communicates action, um, very succinctly and um, in a way that really engages part of the difficulty about writing a script, right, especially if no one has bought from you before, you're not an established filmmaker, is that you're really writing it so that a producer, a funder can read the script and see it in their mind and see the potential of it can see it on, on, on the big screen as they're reading it. So it's very different from another format, like a novel or a poem where the goal is for them to experience the novel or the poem. And, and part of the goal of a script is for it to have a lot of white on it. So you want to not have a ton of words, it should read really quickly. And there is an art to that, you know. And so when I was looking at the action lines, I realized how well selected the verbs were, how much that made every line zing. And I could totally keep up and I didn't need a whole bunch of description. Um, and part of it too, what is, he shares different, um, scripts from authors who have tackled different ideas, um, in different ways, like having a split screen or something like that. And how does, how does that author, that filmmaker represent that on a page so that the producer way before they've hired a director way before they've gotten the funding for it, understands the story and keep up with the story. And so it kind of blew me away because I'm loving this. And uh, and then I was thinking about how I, cuz I have a writing date with a couple of friends and, um, we took a writing class together, a memoir writing class with be, uh, Beverly Dia, who's a phenomenal memoirist and has written a few books and also writes essays. And what she had us do in our workshop was she brought in a lot of samples of flash memoirs. Again, not a thing I knew existed and I'm now obsessed with because there are like one to two page essays that are short moments in someone's memory, um, that always end with a, you know, a a thought learned or like, um, you know, when you go back and you tell a story and suddenly you see what was in it to the lesson learned to be in it or how you relate to your past self by telling the story. Anyway, it's fascinating. Um, and in this age of adhd,<laugh> like not being able to or short attention span, you know, like not I'm having a hard time finishing novel. So the idea of writing something and reading something really short was great. What was extra great about it was she brought in all different kinds of writing samples of published authors and published essays and they all had different techniques. Some of them we would analyze, you know, is it in the second uh, person, is it in the first person? Is it in the third person? Is the verb, are the verbs in the past tense? Are they present tense? Are they imperative? Is it as a list? Is it short paragraphs? Is it long rambling sentences? And it was so fascinating to see how different tempos and rhythms and, you know, communicated a texture to the story. And so I was on this, uh, writing date with a friend and my friend had said that we had, we just read something that was, I think, um, I dunno what was it? I think it was something about the tenses, uh, or the kind of short choppy sentences. And she took that as an assignment. And on our next we just pick a prompt and we write for 10 minutes. And her next prompt, she just practiced that. And I was like, oh, that's so smart. You know, take different writing techniques that you've seen and try them out and they might not be the right fit for you or the right fit for that particular story, but you are going to learn so much by stretching yourself. It's like an actor learning to do Shakespeare, learning to do comedia del arte, learning to do, you know, mime work. It stretches your muscle and teaches you a different way of communicating story of relating to story so that you have more tools in your toolbox. And, and it just, was it kind of the light bulb went off that, of course this is what, you know, this teacher has us doing in scripture. It's the same thing that we're learning from Bev. It's the same writing as script writing. Um, it's the same thing that Picasso has done. And I've also heard comics talk about how, you know, as kids, they had memorized all of Richard Pryor's, you know, entire, uh, comedy, I think disks at the time that he, you know, they came out before before YouTube. But, you know, really learning the pacing of a joke and, and how to deliver a punchline and the setup of a joke by memorizing someone else's and repeating it enough. And, and in fact it got me thinking about how, you know, I'm learning to play the guitar and sing the entire beginning of learning to play guitar and sing is playing covers of other people's songs. It's how you learn to play and, you know, not everyone goes on to then write their own songs, but it's, it's just the same idea of there is such incredible work out there. And, and what's interesting too is I was thinking about this because, you know, as I was thinking of, you know, are you stealing or learning from your masters that you get to choose who your masters are? Um, that like for, you know, for some people, and I hate to say this cuz people will have many strong feelings, but, um, I don't particularly care for The Godfather. I know it's a brilliant film and everybody loves it and talks about it, and I just, it's just not my, it's just not my thing. Like, I'm just not that excited by it. Whereas promising Young Woman, which is a film that Emerald Fennel wrote and directed with Carrie Mulligan is to me just like this brilliant revolutionary film. And that's the kind of thing where I'd wanna go back to the script and write it out and see how did she put this together? How did she communicate this tone, you know, or this story or this character or this inflection from this actor. How, how much did Carrie Mulligan bring to the role? How much did the director bring? I mean, again, she was directing her own script, so maybe that, you know, changed the relationship of how much needed to be represented in the script, but knowing who the people are that you want to learn from, and we live in such an incredible age that you can really do this. And so I've been, again, sick for a couple of weeks. We're not gonna talk about it, but I was thinking about how, you know, in this day and age of<laugh> making plans and getting knocked off course for whatever reason, life keeps throwing you off. Um, that one way to create space to get back into a project. Like if you've been wanting to write for a very long time and you haven't been, maybe just sit down with a novel that you've loved and write, copy out one page of that novel. Or if there's a script you wanna write, there's a great TV show that you're trying to crack. Maybe you sit down and you write the first couple of pages or the first 15 pages of a script. And if you give yourself that task, that space to sit and do the work every morning, or if nighttime is your day or your lunch break, whatever works for you, 20 minutes of that, you will build muscle memory for doing that work. And it will seem less daunting to you to then do your own work because you will have built like sacred time and sacred space, right? Your brain starts to associate, oh, it's 9:00 AM I sit down at this desk and I create and I write and I'm used to having pen and paper and having all this stuff and I'm used to just writing and it's, it's, you know, I'm always looking for gentle bridges back to the work. Um, and, and it was so interesting because, you know, in this class, in the Script Shack, he was really selling us on why this mattered. And my first thought was like, oh, this is so brilliant. This is the one thing I've never really done, is copied a script. And it's been so exciting to discover other people. And now the work has actually moved on to other things like synopsizing. I dunno if that's a verb, the script that we've read. And I realize having been sick that I need a gentle reentry into the work. And so I was thinking maybe this, again, I teach what I need to learn, you know, maybe this is great for me to go back and listen to my own ideas and spend a week just copying scripts because it was so delightful. I learned so much. I got so curious about language and verbs and how to, you know, I, you know, I am, I'm a big reader, but come more, much more from books. And so when I think about communicating on a script page, I tend to write way too much because I think about the interiority of a character and on in a novel that's what you do. You get to write for three pages what someone is thinking or how the action is unfolding and describe every single leaf or whatever in the scene and in a script that doesn't work. And so I'm aware that one of my goals is to really learn how to strip down a script to where it communicates tone and, um, and, and action and, you know, the pacing of it and the character and the energy of it, but without taking up all of this space to explain that. And that's a whole freaking talent that I haven't mastered yet. And so to be able to go back and just feel really good about this practice of stealing from the Masters, um, to just spend time letting that be the thing that I learned and also trusting that it's like doing scales. I'm actually a very big fan of just practicing chords over and over again. You sit a metronome and just do it over and over again. And what's fascinating to me is like most often, my finger's missing about three of the strings every time. So my notes sound terrible, but what I've learned is even if I don't get better in that session, the next time I do it, my fingers are closer to hitting more of the strings every time. So even if you're, even if it feels like you're not really accomplishing anything, there's a muscle memory being built in doing something as simple as copying someone else's work. And so this is my invitation to you. If you are not sure what's next, if you feel like you've got a really good idea, but don't know how to translate it into the medium that you wanna take, you know, take it into, if you've watched TV shows and films for a long time and wanted to write your own, look at a script, spend time writing someone else's script over and, and really get to see the bones of it, um, it's a very, yeah, gentle way into the work. And also like an incredibly, I think what's interesting is it feels really gentle, but I think it's also incredibly powerful. It's a real, um, uh, foundational tool. You're really building scaffolding so that whatever, right? You're incredibly unique ideas of stories that only you can tell the voice that only you have still requires that structure in order to be delivered. And so by copying someone else's and getting a sense of how writing in general is done, then you have this incredible scaffolding that you don't have to think about when you start writing your own. And I think that's a huge gift to your future self, to your future self who wants to be doing this kind of work in the world. All right, um, here's to<laugh> googling the internet for all the things that you wanna be learning this week. And, um, I'm really glad I came back for this. Be well, my friends.