Interview (Part 5): Stephanie Shannon

2013 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting winner and Black List honoree.

Stephanie Shannon not only is one of five recipients of the 2013 Academy Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting, she did it with her very first full-length screenplay: “Queen of Hearts.” Beyond that, the script landed on the 2013 Black List. And just last week it was announced that Seth Gordon is going to direct “Life in Rewind”, based on a script Stephanie wrote. A great opportunity to reprise my March 2014 interview with Stephanie.

Today in Part 5, Stephanie provides her take on key aspects of the screenwriting craft:

Scott: Let me ask you a few craft questions if I may. First one. How do you come up with story ideas?

Stephanie: I don’t have a set method. I’m trying to be better about actively looking, reading articles and listening to NPR, that sort of thing. I know people do that, and I want to do more of that.

I find that if I try to think of ideas like it’s a job, then it’s more difficult. That’s one of the things I want to work on, being more attuned and open to ideas and paying attention to potential stories around me.

Scott: When you’re prepping your story, which of the aspects of prep do you tend to devote the most time and focus to?

Stephanie: For “Queen of Hearts,” it was pretty fast, relatively. I researched for about two months. I researched the whole time, but I didn’t start writing, just purely researched, for about two months. Then I did a preliminary outline. I didn’t get too detailed into it. This was my first feature I had completed, so I wasn’t sure exactly the correct process. I just did whatever I thought necessary to organize my thoughts.

I think what really helped me was actually just sitting down and writing. Once I typed “fade in,” it was like all of a sudden it just stated coming together. I think it’s important for me to at some point just start and then adjust the structure as I go.

Scott: You mentioned earlier about how important it was to know the characters, that that was key to the authenticity of the writing experience.

Stephanie: Oh, for this one it was really important for me, especially with the main character, with Dodgson, to read enough of his letters and diaries and the biographies on him to know enough about him where I felt like I would want to sit down and have a drink with this person. When you have it in your mind that your character is a separate entity that’s not just something abstract in your head, that’s a good place to start.

The supporting characters, I think it’s really important to know if they do something, why are they doing it. You have to think about what would be going on in their head and why they would make a decision as opposed to any other decision they could make and how that relates to their personality. I think just thinking of them as real, living, breathing people that exist somewhere outside of your imagination is really helpful for me.

To me, writing is a lot like playing God. You’ve got these people down there with free will. And you don’t want to tell them exactly what to do per se. But you can know their minds and tendencies and orchestrate certain events in their lives that nudge them in the direction you want them to go, to fulfill a greater plan. If I look at the relationship between plot and character in that way, I think the result becomes much more organic.

Scott: How about theme? When you wrote this script, did you have an idea before you started writing it about some of the key themes, or did those emerge as you were writing? How did that work with you?

Stephanie: Theme is really important to me. They emerged in my research — learning about what made “Alice in Wonderland” different from other children’s stories and learning about what was really special about Lewis Carroll and what was going on at Oxford at the time.

In my research I found so many interesting things to mine in the story. I think I ended up embracing the themes that also meant something to me personally. Father/daughter relationships are an important theme with me. I think it was important to me that the theme not only serve the story but also was something that was close to my own heart personally. I think those are always the stories that I want to tell, that I’ll end up telling the best.

Tomorrow in Part 6, Stephanie answers more craft questions and offers advice to those trying to break into the business.

For Part 1, go here.

Part 2, here.

Part 3, here.

Part 4, here.

Stephanie is repped by CAA and Brillstein Entertainment Partners.

Twitter: @stephshanz.

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