Interview: Elizabeth Chomko (2015 Nicholl Winner)

Scott Myers
Go Into The Story
Published in
2 min readJun 5, 2016

--

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.

Elizabeth Chomko

Here are links to the six installments of the entire interview:

Part 1: “My much older cousin gave me a journal for Christmas one year, when I was maybe seven. I was like, ‘What are you supposed to do with it?’ She said, ‘You just write in it.’”

Part 2: “ I guess that’s why I wanted to write about it. I wanted to pin down that juxtaposition, that tightrope between hilarity and heartbreak.”

Part 3: “I wrote it on instinct. I’ve never thought about writing from a screenwriterly perspective. I still always write what feels right without thinking too hard about it. Especially with a first draft.”

Part 4: “In my years on this planet, limited as they may be, it seems the biggest challenge for men and women is that generally, men live in the black and white, and generally, women live in vast degrees of color and shades of gray and a multitude of dimensions.”

Part 5: “Writing movies is like surgery. Every moment needs to be crafted; threads need to be implanted early and woven through out, it needs to be tight and lean and agile and full of diverse authentic bits.”

Part 6: “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.

Elizabeth is repped by ICM Partners and MXN Entertainment.

Twitter: @elizabethchomko.

--

--