Give Your Screenplay the Magic Touch with Script Wizard Michael Heartsong

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What does it take to make a good script great? Everyone seeks that frustratingly elusive magic formula, but to put it simply: you need to have a really interesting story about really interesting people, and you've got to tell your story in a way that grabs an audience's attention and never lets go. How exactly you do that is what this workshop is all about.

During this information-packed workshop with development executive and script consultant Michael Heartsong, a.k.a. Script Wizard, you'll learn:

• Three simple techniques to overcome writer's block
•  The three items a script MUST exhibit in order to be attractive to Hollywood (and they aren't sex, violence, or chases)
•  The important and vital difference between a spec script and a shooting script
•  Script blindness 
• What the three-act structure really is, and why it is so important 
• 7 specific techniques guaranteed to make your screenplay much more interesting, engaging, and entertaining than it is now
•  Proper formatting and why this is important
•  A few ideas on finding an agent or manager
• A few tips on getting your script sold
• The significant ways in which a screenplay differs from a theatrical play 

This will be a highly interactive event, so bring your questions, issues, and concerns. Michael wants everyone who attends to come away with specific knowledge and insight about how to write better screenplays.

  

Saturday, September 14th
1:00pm-3:30pm

At The Writers Junction

General Admission: $15 

* FREE for Junction members * 

Limited Seats Available

RSVP here:

http://screenplaymagic.eventbrite.com

open to members & non-members
1001 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, CA 90401

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About Michael Heartsong:

 

 For the past 10 years, Michael Heartsong has been a Development Executive and confidential script consultant, working with writers and producers to help make scripts MUCH better than they were when he first became involved. As an independent script consultant, he has always provided his help with an unconditional satisfaction money-back guarantee. If a client honestly feels he or she has not received abundant value, Michael's commitment is that he will cheerfully refund any money that was paid. No one yet has asked for his or her money back. His skill at helping to make scripts much better has earned him the moniker of "Script Wizard" by his happy, satisfied clients. You are encouraged to visit his website at www.scriptwizard.net.

 

Michael has been involved in the film industry for 30 years, and has an extensive background in production as a Director of Photography, cameraman, grip, electrician, sound recordist, editor, production manager, and projectionist.

 

From Michael's Clients:
 

"We'd been through six drafts and knew the project simply wasn't working. But no one seemed to know what was wrong or how to fix it. Your five pages of notes broke the logjam and made everything crystal clear. Now I understand what my film is really all about, and we are moving full steam ahead on a revision. Thanks!"

"Your viewpoint and comments on our project were enormously refreshing and insightful. I've never worked with anyone who comes at scripts from the perspective you do. Besides being innovative, your approach helped my partners and me better understand the film we want to make. Before your help, we were having difficulty getting a draft of the script we all liked. Now the project really sings! I look forward to engaging your assistance on future projects."

"I've directed or produced more than 50 films. I like to think I know something about this business. But, frankly, I was stymied with our project until you came along. Your extremely insightful and penetrating comments enabled us to break out of the blockages we were in, and understand how we needed to modify characters, plot line and story points to make the script and film work the way we wanted it to. I was initially very skeptical about your ability to be of help. You've made me a believer! I look forward to working with you on future projects. Thanks again for your help."

The Junction

Writers Blogging about Writers Talking about Writing #2

John McPhee

 

This guy, more commonly referred to as John McPhee, published his first book, A Sense of Where You Are, in 1965, but The Paris Review didn't get around to interviewing him until 2010. Slackers (feel free to follow this characterization to all extremes of extrapolation).  Nevertheless, they did - fortunately - interview him and the whole thing went quite well. 

Among other things, McPhee discusses his history with The New Yorker, recurrent friendships with blind men, and a 60,000 word manuscript he read over the phone. Most significantly- a least for the sake of writers needing to blog about writers talking about writing - McPhee discusses the structure in his writing. Here he speaks specifically about working on Encounters with the Archdruid (1971), which covers confrontations between environmentalist David Brower and his ideological opposition:

...I read the notes and then I read them again... looking for logical ways in which to subdivide the material. I’m looking for things that fit together, things that relate. For each of these components, I create a code—it’s like an airport code. If a topic is upstate New York, I’ll write UNY or something in the margin...[Encounters with the Archdruid] had thirty-six components. What I ended up with was thirty-six three-by-five cards, each with a code word...I went into a seminar room here at the university, and I laid the thirty-six cards out on the table.

McPhee then explains:

After a while I was looking at two cards: Upset Rapid, which is a big-time rapid in the Colorado River, and Alpinist. In Upset Rapid, Brower doesn’t ride the rapid. Why doesn’t he ride the rapid? His answer to Floyd Dominy is, “Because I’m chicken.” That’s a pretty strong scene. What next? Well, there are more than seventy peaks in the Sierra Nevada that were first ascended by David Brower, hanging by his fingernails on some cliff. “Because I’m chicken”? This juxtaposition is just loaded with irony, and by putting the Alpinist right after Upset Rapid, in the white space between those two sections there’s a hell of a lot of stuff that I don’t have to say. It’s told by the structure. It’s all crackling along between those two things. So I put those two cards side by side. Now there are thirty-four other parts there on the table.

What McPhee describes here is a fundamental creative process that, most of the time, isn't given much deliberate thought: the arrangement of somethings and nothings. This is largely intuitive and, admittedly, the sheer vastness of somethings and nothings that comprise even a couple of sentences means it's easier this way. The same goes for art (the arrangement of positive and negative space) and music (the arrangement of sounds and silences). The 'nothings' in writing, the absences of details and the gaps in time, serve not only to frame the 'somethings' but to generate meaning that, as McPhee says, "[is] all crackling along between those two things." The Japanese even have a word for this crackling - Ma. Ma is not exactly negative space, or the interval between two things. Rather, it is the thing that takes place in the imagination of the human who experiences these things.

At the levels of sentences and paragraphs, we cannot be expected to attend to every something and nothing; however, on larger scales, it becomes more feasible to carefully and deliberately organize for powerful effect.

So, do as McPhee does. Try to draw out the ma in your work.

If you would like to read the interview in its entirety, just click here.

Meet our Spark Apprentices: Leigh-Ann & Daniel!

Hi this is Leigh-Ann and Daniel. We are apart of a program called Spark. Spark is really cool because we get to come to The Writers Junction. The Junction is really awesome because we get to write different stories and meet new people. There's a lot of nice and funny people at The Writers Junction. The Junction is really cozy and half of the time people are writing and the other half people are just relaxing on the comfy couches. When you walk in you feel welcome and relax. When you come all your stress from driving and the traffic goes away. When you are here you feel calm and there are so many good books to read that came from the writers here at The Junction. This is the best place to get all your books, plays, and movies done.
- By Leigh-Ann and Daniel, local 7th-graders