Interview (Part 6): Elizabeth Chomko (2015 Nicholl Winner)

Elizabeth Chomko wrote the original screenplay “What They Had” which won a 2015 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Recently I had the opportunity to chat with Elizabeth about her background as a writer and her award-winning screenplay.

Today in Part 6, Elizabeth provides some advice to aspiring writers:

Scott: I’m going to take a guess here that of the parts of writing, you enjoy dialogue a lot because your dialogue in the script is terrific. Of course there’s a Midwestern cadence and feel to the characters who live back there.

At some point, right in the middle of the script, Bridget starts to do that “ta” thing, the TA. Was that a conscious thing, or did she start going back into her Midwestern roots?

Elizabeth: I guess it was a conscious thing. It wasn’t calculated, I just heard it that way in my head. It made sense to me that she’d fall back into that twang. I do that when I go back or I’m around my dad or my uncles. And since Bridget has things unresolved from her childhood, when she goes home, it’s almost impossible for her not to step back into that person she was. I think we all do that around our family of origin. I’m always the bossy know-it-all older sister when I’m with my family.

Scott: That was probably pretty easy for you to zero in on some of the dialogue there. The ability to write dialogue, is that something people, that’s a gift they have, or is that something you can develop? If it’s the latter what can you do to develop your ability to write dialogue?

Elizabeth: Oh, I think it’s something you can develop and hone. I look back at my earlier stuff and a lot of my characters talk in the same voice. I suppose having an ear for dialogue is something some of us are gifted with and some of us are not, so perhaps we don’t all start at the same place, but I do think we get stronger as our work improves, as we do with everything.

Being an actor helped tremendously, gave me a big leg up. Working as an actor — or rather, attempting to work — you read screenplay after screenplay, and when you’re an actor who does a lot of attempting to work rather than working, you definitely aren’t getting the good scripts sent to you. But that was great for me as a writer. Reading bad scripts is just as helpful as reading good ones, maybe even more so — you get to see what works and what doesn’t, where the big problems are, what could be done to fix them. You can’t see the mechanics of a great script the same way. And you see how dialogue is a huge part of what works or doesn’t — how great dialogue makes characters jump off the page and stay in your mind like old friends.

And as an actor who worked a lot in the theatre — a lot of period pieces — I was always having to do some dialect. I really got into dialects and how they work. They’re fascinating. It’s much more than changing vowel sounds. It’s placement in the mouth, how your mouth moves, which syllables are stressed, the melody of the language, the cultural attitude. It’s those things that make a dialect sound authentic. I imagine geeking out over that stuff helped.

Scott: You raise a good point. I’ll oftentimes recommend certainly to my university students, I say, “You should take some acting classes.” The questions that actors ask about the characters are oftentimes very similar what writers would be, or almost exactly the same sometimes. Then, just to have the experience of saying dialogue.

Elizabeth: Being an actor helped develop my empathetic muscle. You can’t be judging a character you’re trying to play. You have to search for what makes them human, what’s driving them in every moment. It’s just as important for a writer to be empathetic, to be able to wrap your head around the vulnerabilities of every character in your world, even the ones that are the most despicable.

Scott: Yeah, that great exercise to think of every character of the protagonist in their own story.

Elizabeth: For sure.

Scott: Finally, this question I’m sure you are asked or will be as your career advances. What advice can you offer to aspiring screenwriters or filmmakers about learning the craft and breaking into the business?

Elizabeth: I think the first rule is Nobody Knows Anything. Every creative or exec in this business, every script, every movie has it’s own wild, wacky journey. I don’t know anything either. I can share advice based on my experience, wisdom I’ve heard that rings true for me. I think getting wisdoms from a lot of people is essential. You’ll see what keeps getting repeated — nobody knows anything is a big one — and how vastly different everything else is. It will give you the guidelines and the permission to carve your own way.

What has been true for me is:

Write. Write write write — grocery lists, journal entries, emails, short stories, whatever, it doesn’t matter. Write at every opportunity. Expect it to be awful, it makes it so much easier. That way you develop your writing habit and get to know your voice. Your voice is your best friend, it’s what makes your stories worth reading or watching or whatever. The stronger your relationship with your voice and your writing habit, the more you will love it and need it and get joy from it and be unable to live without it. It’s like learning an instrument. It’s all about getting to a place where you can just sit down and play, where you can get in the pocket and jam like a great jazz musician and marvel at how good you’ve gotten and how goddamn good that feels.

I also think a person starting out might get further working like hell on one great story, spending their time and energy making one script outstanding — rather than writing two or three or four decent scripts thinking the odds are better that somebody will like one. Decent scripts sit on desks, great scripts get passed around. They spread like wildfire. So swing for the fences.

Especially if that person has ambitions to direct it. It’s an uphill battle for a first time director no matter what, but the slope seems less steep if the script is exceptional.

Reading is just as helpful. If you want to be a screenwriter, read screenplays. Bad ones — thinking about what you would do to fix them — and the great ones, the ones that blow your mind. They give you permission to be that great, that ballsy, that original, that confident of a storyteller. Read as many screenplays you can get your hands on and then watch the movie so you can see the execution and what got cut.

Remember that nobody knows your story but you. People will run into oncoming traffic to give you their notes. Again, nobody knows anything. It’s essential to get notes, but it’s just as essential to protect your work. Figure out a barometer for which notes to take and which to ignore. I spent a lot of time spinning my wheels on notes I should have blown off. I’ve also gotten wonderful, wonderful notes that have taught me how to craft a screenplay and unlocked great mysteries and pushed my scripts far beyond what I could ever have done alone. The way I’ve learned to tell the difference is to be an absolute slave to that deep, instinctive gut feeling. It’s the only thing that knows what’s right and what isn’t.

By the way, you can get notes from anyone. Some of my best notes have come from people not in the business. They’re the audience.

Watch movies. Keep a record of the ones that move you to pieces and change you forever — it’s a hint to the stories you are called to tell. Study movies, talk about them, think about them. Forgive yourself for what you have not seen yet, what you do not know yet, what you have not done yet. You are right where you belong.

Work your ass off. And never, ever, ever be afraid.

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

Part 2, here.

Part 3, here.

Part 4, here.

Part 5, here.

Elizabeth is repped by ICM Partners and MXN Entertainment.

Twitter: @elizabethchomko.