Daily Dialogue — August 3, 2014

Forrester: [begins typing] Go ahead.
Jamal: Go ahead and what?
Forrester: Write.
Jamal: What’re you doing?
Forrester: I’m writing, like you’ll be… when you start punching those keys.

Jamal stares at the typewriter. Forrester stops.

Forrester: Is there a problem?
Jamal: Nah, I’m just thinking.
Forrester: No, no thinking. That comes later. You write your first draft with your heart. You rewrite with your head.

— Finding Forrester (2000), written by Mike Rich

The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Teaching.

Trivia: In the opening, the stack of books (presumably Jamal’s) is comprised of the following titles: ‘Journey to the Center of the Earth’, Jules Verne; ‘After the Banquet,’ Yukio Mishima; ‘The Sound of Waves,’ Yukio Mishima; ‘The Temple of Dawn,’ Yukio Mishima; ‘The Sailor Who Feel from Grace with the Sea’, Yukio Mishima; ‘The Viking Portable Chekhov’; ‘Philosophical Fragments,’ Soren Kierkegaard; ‘The Sickness Unto Death,’ Soren Kierkegaard; ‘Fear and Trembling,’ Soren Kierkegaard; ‘Marquis de Sade: A Study,’ Simone de Beauvoir; ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, James Joyce; ‘Sometimes a Great Notion,’ Ken Kesey; ‘Finnegans Wake,’ James Joyce; ‘The Illustrated Man,’ Ray Bradbury; ‘Fool for Love,’ Sam Shepard; ‘Discourse on Method and the Meditations on First Philosophy’, Rene Descartes.

Dialogue On Dialogue: Hey, how about a teaching lesson for us! Personally I do a lot of thinking about a story before hitting a first draft. But I do try to clear my mind before every scene and write from a feeling-place. However we do it, it’s important to imbue our story with points of emotional resonance and connection for a script reader. 

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