What to Do About Your Problem Pets

The Personal Projects That Take Forever & Delay Your Overall Progress as a Writer

No, we’re not referring to projects with animals or actual pets, though our pets can certainly be inspiring and worth writing about. Pictured above are Founder Jeffrey Gordon (JG) and Junior, who passed two years ago at 14. Thanks to friend and alumnus Milana Vayntrub for the photo after he was first adopted.

Free Mini-Camp This Friday

via Our YouTube Channel

Pet Projects & What To Do About Them

Friday, Sept. 18th, 11am (LA Time)

by Founder Jeffrey Gordon (JG)

Please RSVP by Thursday to:

support@writersbootcamp.com

we’ll send the link by Thursday afternoon

If you have creative questions for JG, email now to the address above even if you cannot attend the event live

 

Pet Projects and the Profession of Writing

Please join JG for a brief Mini-Camp to discuss pet projects–the passion projects that writers tend to carry around with them, often literally for many years. The goal is to resolve the continual delays of real progress and to recommend writing additional scripts that can foster the clout to gain traction for any project.

JG will share insight about the various obstacles (see below) that can leave the project you care about most in an underwhelming state, and to acknowledge how unwittingly maintaining an outsider’s view of the craft of screenwriting can continue a trend of unrealized hopes and a kind of career purgatory.

Make no mistake: From a constructive view, the Oscar telecast attests each year that classic subjects like human rights, gender rights, genocide, the Holocaust, stories of addiction, sexual trauma, and family drama can be made relevant–and that means YOUR SPECIFIC TAKE ON AN ISSUE OR SUBJECT may make a case for your project despite its possibly derivative nature.

But it’s imperative for a professional writer to consciously elevate material beyond vanity or personal connection to the material. Family legacies, unique historical achievements, stories of overcoming great odds, scenarios built from one’s whimsical imagination, and homage to or adaptation of works from childhood–are worthwhile and hold inherent merit. However, too often writers remain unavailable to do the work that only the owner and lover of the pet can truly do.

A personal story is as dependent on its steward as a domesticated animal that cannot feed or walk itself. Until ready to go into the wild–to be produced–a script cannot survive without being fed regularly, if not daily. It’s either growing–or conversely can become rather lifeless.

Writing–and writing screenplays–can be a wonderful hobby–but then, if that’s all it is or just a lark, then it’s crucial not to harbor the sense that you’re just one read, one contest, one producer or one contact away from it becoming viable. In most cases, the idea will be limited by the facts and a mere content-basis level of expression.

Two biopic examples can be helpful toward seeing how to elevate a project: In WALK THE LINE, the significance of the 2nd-Act Dynamic Relationship with June Carter, Reese Witherspoon’s Oscar-winning role, turned the life of Johnny Cash into a story expressed through the wife of Johnny Cash.

And the recent independent film release of TONY, about Anthony Bourdain, depicts him at 19 years old indicating his future trajectory instead of his actual adult life. These two approaches focused the timelines and arrangement of the material from the broader landscape of potential encounters.

A main pain point on pet projects is the inexperience of a writer and hesitation to take enough license to test and swiftly focus the material to create a more conceptual approach. And in that challenging space the rewrites tend to default to purely linear, plot-driven, and text-oriented changes that cannot scale, transcend or solve deeper issues.

Personal Note from JG: “In these past few weeks of summer, I’ve read more scripts than my usual allotment and found in common certain debilitating issues that persist by writers who have that one personal project. Not just their latest script but their ONE script.

Chief among the challenges is the lack of availability to commit to the MANY NECESSARY STAGES of achievement for it to have its own life–a life beyond the creator. While time goes quickly within our Pro Membership groups, at least there is commitment to depth of rewriting and drilling down an idea.

I just rarely see most writers, including some past Basic Training alumni, willing to CHANGE and SHIFT to a professional disposition. There’s often the anticipation of finding a contact who can extend the work, someone to take the hand-off, except it’s a fallacy because everyone with that ability, capacity or pedigree has their own pet project–and often more than one through their abundance of ideas and opportunity.

While so many excellent people have studied with us, the tools atrophy without applying them, and in that way time may return them to a less committed and more naive sense of the business. Unless a writer is exceedingly entrepreneurial or actively attracting or investing financing, the one pet project will continue to be a personal outlet and in screenplay form is like a very complex personal journal.”

A Few More of the Challenges

In most cases, it’s the stories from your life that are not quite the version they need to be to attract interest and financing to catapult you as a writer–and in that manner they remain underdeveloped and the sole calling card in one’s quest for a breakthrough.

Of course, to be positive, so many alumni are accomplished artists with wonderfully evolved and cultivated voices. At least a couple times per month, we discover amazing creative achievements and new credits at the highest levels within our community.

Yet the personal nature of a story may allow it to slip past the battery of tests and tools to affirm its fresh take. Everything is derivative; the key is to own the arguments against your project and then illustrate your conscious departures and freshness.

Here are a few questions to apply to any project:

–Isn’t the situation or circumstance similar to other produced movies and series? If so, why does yours matter and what is distinguishing about it on a practical entertainment level?

–Can you pinpoint the audience demographics because in most cases a project is NOT for everyone?

–Does the title have a thematic implication and distinction, in addition to the physical reference?

–What’s genuinely clever or surprising about the adventure–and does the Main Character experience track with the Audience Experience? Is there anything magically ironic about it?

Feel free to invite a creative friend to the Mini-Camp looking for support as a writer or filmmaker, or an actor creating a platform or vehicle for success.

If you RSVP and your plans change, please let us know. While the live stream on YouTube will be generally accessible for at least a week, we still prepare to be available and it’s helpful to know who’s watching.

Our Professional Members in 18 months will create a foundation for an arsenal of scripts in the same time a writer working in a vacuum may write a few overly linear drafts of their pet project. In a collaborative medium the lack of conceptual testing and effective rewriting will delay real creative progress–and for someone who wants to write, it’s disheartening to see time pass without true progress.

For questions, call 310/998-1199 or email jg@writersbootcamp.com.