Dispatch From The Quest: Waka Brown

Over the course of the 24 weeks I am working with the writers in The Quest, each will write a weekly dispatch to share with the GITS community. There are several reasons for doing this, the main one educational: Hopefully you will learn something of value for your own understanding of the craft from the experiences of the Questers. I should also add they are a great group of people, so I expect you will enjoy getting to know them.

Today: Waka Brown shares her Week 1 experience of balancing work, family, The Quest… and personal hygiene:

Super excited to have been selected for the Quest 2013! I’ve been on my own screenwriting quest for a long time now. I started writing screenplays because I loved (still do) movies and despite the crazy statistics I’ve heard such as “It’s more likely you’ll be struck by lightning than sell a screenplay” and “Your odds of selling your first screenplay are 146,000 to 1” I decided to give it a go.

Fast forward many years, nine screenplays, a few meetings, some minor contest success, and many, many rejections later, I had to admit I was getting weary. Granted, I also have a husband, three little boys, and a part-time job to manage so that was also contributing to my weariness. Then along came Scott Myers’ announcement of The Quest Initiative. Two thousand loglines with ultimately 4–5 chosen? Sounded like pretty good odds to me! I mean, I hadn’t been struck by lightning, I didn’t sell my first screenplay — maybe this would be my lucky break. (I had won a huge Snoopy cake as part of a spin-the-wheel type of carnival game in elementary school and been selected to shoot 3-pointers for cash during halftime of a college basketball game but I refused to believe that that was the extent of the luck I’d have during this lifetime. Plus, I missed all my 3-pointers and it was more humiliating than anything resembling luck).

And Holy Frickin’ Cow, I was selected.

After the jubilation came the planning. I looked at the schedule. The Quest was going to be a lot of work. Now, I noticed from a lot of Twitter profiles that there are a lot of you out there like me — managing a day job, families and other obligations while also trying to chase down our dreams. It’s not easy and whenever anything isn’t easy, I like to break the task down to simple goals that are easy to remember and understand. So here are my 3 goals in terms of juggling Other Life and Quest Life.

• My family will not suffer
• My work will not suffer
• My personal hygiene will not suffer.

I am happy to report that after Week 1 of the Quest, I have successfully fulfilled these goals. Work deadlines have been met — check! Family has not suffered… well, I have made my family, namely my three boys suffer, but it had nothing to do with my time on the Quest, they were being very naughty and they totally had it coming to them. And I didn’t have time to make dinner one night and my husband rather gleefully ate one of those Marie Callender microwave pot pies that I keep on telling him will stop his heart if he eats too many. But otherwise, no suffering! and I have showered, brushed and flossed my teeth… er, brushed anyway every single day of Week 1. Score one for my sticker chart.

So after the planning and goal setting came the “Getting to Know” my fellow Questers part of the Quest. It’s an impressive group, and their loglines are fantastic. Which of course leads to something every writer is probably familiar with:

Self-Doubt.

Now, the self-doubt was probably amplified by the fact that I opened up our first lecture and I saw it was “Core 1: Plot.” Then, further down the page, “Plot = Structure.” You know when they say, “Know your weaknesses?” That’s it right there. Contest feedback, writer group feedback, Blacklist feedback. Characters and dialogue? Pretty good. Premise? Not bad. Structure? Meh.

Allow me to venture off on a tangent that I promise has some relevance to Core 1: Plot. We recently moved house from a place that we’ve lived in for close to a decade (and yes, it sucked. Some advice: take everything you haven’t used/worn/looked at in a month and THROW IT THE HELL AWAY. You will never, I repeat never watch that Nicolas Cage Bad Lieutenant DVD). We’re in the process of selling our old house and in deciding a price we were trying to find comps. There’s a very nice house, much newer than the one we’re trying to sell, bigger… just a couple blocks from ours and it’s not selling. The sellers have dropped and slashed the price, but still no go. Turns out it has foundation issues and no amount of granite slab counters or fancy toilets that can flush a bucket of golf balls will make people want it. Same with a screenplay.

So, even though plot/structure is not my forte, I understand that working on it from the very beginning is a good thing. Thankfully, I’m working with a great group of Questers and my weariness has been replaced with enthusiasm. Here’s to a great first week!

Waka, it’s interesting how you compare the idea of story structure to a house because I’ve seen or heard that same analogy many times from screenwriters. Here’s an example from Charles Bennett, screenwriter whose credits include The Man Who Knew Too Much, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and The 39 Steps:

“The construction is the most important goddamned thing. It’s like building a house–you have to build the outside properly before you put the bits and pieces inside afterward. Get your story, get your architecture right, and you can always add your dialogue afterwards.”

Screenplays represent a unique narrative form in that they exist in order to make a movie. In other words at some level, they are a blueprint for a film’s production, and therefore structure is a critical consideration in the writing of a script.

The fact I begin the screenplay theory part of The Quest with the principle Plot = Structure reflects this point, however the way we approach it is grounded in character. So Waka, if screenplay structure is a weakness, but you are good with character, I strongly suspect you will do just fine because the way we will go about this process, the plot will emerge from the characters.

If you have any observations or questions for Waka, please head to Comments and share them.

Tomorrow: Another Dispatch From The Quest.

About Waka: Kansan turned Californian turned Oregonian. Fan of Nat Faxon & Jim Rash, Richard Curtis, Tina Fey (who isn’t?), & I still use a $30 Tracfone @wakatb

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