Pet Projects & What To Do About Them

How to Avoid Typical Writing Limitations

Sat. March 15th, 10am-11:15am (LA Time) via zoom

by Founder Jeffrey Gordon (JG)

PLEASE RSVP HERE 

After you RSVP, zoom will control your access.

Pet Projects Tug on Our Heartstrings: Do They Represent Us as Professionals?

Please join JG for a brief Mini-Camp to discuss pet projects, classic challenges of personal and family stories, and how to adapt true stories to cultivate a voice as an artist.

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 career.

A more ideal scenario will be to develop a style of project that may be informed by your experiences and point of view, the kind of choices that can have different iterations–as well as numerous drafts of each script–to illustrate your study and authority over a genre and format.

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.

As JG shared in the last Mini-Camp, when your writing samples as a package evolve to illustrate your voice and level of conceptual sophistication, your shared sensibility with other artists and writers will inspire support and help–and you will “attract representation”, not have to seek it. However, it’s often the personal, pet projects that are the most derivative and least interesting.

At key junctures of the development of a current script, the best way to improve it is to start a new project, primarily as a way to recall ALL the strategies and exercises that go into the creative development of a story for an audience. After multiple drafts, writers tend to become immersed in the words on the page and the text, losing their objectivity and their initial creative intentions, conceptually speaking.

Of session, a project based on coveted intellectual property may activate opportunities and interest from executives and producers, though that may not assuage their concerns about the “nearly self-evident limitations” of that sole script you’ve been peddling prematurely.

Our Official Anniversary is in October, Though March is Profound

Writers Boot Camp’s support of countless careers for over 35 years (36 years this month since the first experimental roster in JG’s living room in March of 1989) has encouraged alumni through unique tools and techniques to activate and align through focusing on the work.

The strategies of integrating more definitive rewriting techniques, regularly updating Premise Lines and project lists, and owning one’s storytelling approach–within scripts and manuscripts, and also in the arrangement of shared personal experiences and anecdotes–empower and cultivate a sensibility, a creative intention and direction.

Pictured below is JG’s dog Junior, who we had to say goodbye to a few months ago at the age of 14.  LA alumni may remember Junior sharing the stage at many past Mini-Camps and Industry Interviews hosted at our prior Bergamot Station headquarters in Santa Monica.