Lorene Scafaria on building a career as a screenwriter

Lorene Scafaria has established herself as a writer, TV and movie director with such films as Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World and The Meddler, starring Susan Sarandon which is currently in theaters.

In this Co.Create feature, Scafaria reflects on how she has managed to carve out a career in Hollywood and her writing process:

“I’d written three screenplays by the time I moved to L.A. and felt like two of them were livable. None of those have been made, and I think, looking back, for a very good reason,” Scafaria says. “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist was my ninth script and I’d say the one I’d done just before that, it kind of became my calling card. It was about a guy who fired people for a living, who then gets fired from his job — kind of like what Up in the Air ended up being, but before that. It was the first script I thought, like, if this isn’t something, I should leave town. If this isn’t a script, I don’t know what is. And that script got me the job for Nick and Norah’s.”

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“I either start with the character, or with a part of a story I know I want to touch on, but I usually just try to write the first 30 pages of something without an outline, and allow for the story to breathe or the characters to talk and think,” Scafaria says. “I know that sounds corny, but I like to just see what happens and make sure I understand the characters well enough before I start to take them somewhere. I’m allowing them to walk around wherever it is they want to go and then find inspiration from there. And then of course you can go back and change absolutely everything that you did in those 30 pages.”

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“If you are ever stuck, just try to live your life a little bit,” Scafaria says. “Because you can get lost in your own head and kind of forget to interact with people and be social and realize that a lot of inspiration comes from just getting out of your head and seeing other people and remembering that there is a world outside of you. I think that’s pretty important.”

Takeaways:

• You have to be willing to commit to the possibility of writing multiple scripts before you have the learned the craft sufficiently enough to produce a story which grabs peoples’ attention in Hollywood. You cannot expect overnight success.
• Instead locking in to some preconceived paradigm or story structure, give yourself the freedom to explore your characters and story universe. Always better to write from inside-out rather than standing above your story and writing outside-in.
• Living life and engaging with the world is an essential part of being a writer. That not only helps us to keep from getting “lost” in our own head, but also to feed our creativity and inspiration.

Here is a trailer for The Meddler:

For the rest of the article on Lorene Scafaria, go here.