Senior Project Blog 20

I had talked to my mentor over the phone about my career plan. I want to pursue screenwriting, travel writing, and writing novels. I was told that with all those career choices comes a big uncertainty and that it mostly depends on luck, networking, and talent in the end. I had made it clear that I have no inclination or huge dream of becoming a Hollywood screenwriter and that I wanted to write screenplays for indie movies that can entertain and provoke people to think more in depth about life. I am really glad that I have chosen screenwriting for my senior project because not only did I learn a lot about writing, but I had gotten a mentor who knows of other screenwriters.

Senior Project Blog 19

I have realized that I really am capable of writing good material, but it takes the motivation and love of writing. Before we started the script I had loved the idea of writing more than the actual writing and by the end of it I started cultivating love for writing itself. I'm going to be honest and say that I've never fully finished a story before and when I finished this script it was amazing to me how I could start off with a character and see the character grow and go through conflicts and in the end not be the same person that they were in the beginning. To me this can be comparable to having a child because with writing you can have just so much control of your character, but when your character develops a personality and comes across conflicts, they lead the story in a direction that the writer probably has never intended.

Senior Project Blog 18

I've been fixing mistakes here and there and polishing up my script. I've grown tired of reading my script and I do at times feel inclined to change some scenes; it's true that an artist never is fully satisfied with their work. While writing for the past weeks I have grown as a writer, I really pushed the limits on my writing because prior to this I've always been a lazy writer. I've also discovered my love for writing stories with depth, stories that are set in bizarre settings, but reflect reality.

Senior Project Blog 17

A few days ago I had met with my mentor and we spent a long time not only going over Act III, but the entire script. Since I had decided to cut down my script significantly, we were deciding which scenes to cut out and we had to be careful because we wanted the story to flow. I was being hesitant on cutting down a lot of the scenes because I had actually grown quite attach to it. We went over the script from beginning to end twice and he marked up which parts needed a little work, grammatical errors, and the day before he mentored me I put it narration in the beginning and he crossed it all out telling me to never use narration. My mentor has already left for the Philippines and it's been definitely a very writing intensive month for me because we had to squeeze in so much work. But I'm really glad because for the most part we had kept up with our mentoring/writing schedule.

Senior Project Blog 16

I was completely dry of ideas for Act III and what happened after defined why I love writing; the random moments of ideas. There was no use in sitting in front of a blank page on a computer screen so I got up and went on with my day as usual. I was completing mundane household tasks such as washing the dishes and doing the laundry, but it was while I was vacuuming that a sudden idea popped into my mind. So then I immediately got back on my computer and managed to write 12 decent pages, and the rest I will be finishing tonight. I look forward to writing 'THE END' on this script.

Senior Project Blog 15

Mentoring Hours - 1 hour (11 hours so far)

I'm working on the climax of my script and I had to keep on brainstorming on different ways my main character Marissa could finally get the documents on the cargo ship so they could expose the government. I kept trying to avoid deus ex machina which is a tip my mentor gave me and one that I fully agree with because deus ex machina is taking the lazy way out. The first 30 minutes with my mentor was going over the first half of what I had written for ACT III. We talked about my idea of cutting down the script which I'm hesitant about because I tend to get attached to what I write and all the hard work I had put on all those pages seems like a waste, but it's something he told me to think further about. The other 30 minutes he was telling me about the movie industry (what it takes to make it as a writer, what the industry is like, ect) and he was giving me career advice that he will later expand even more on.

Senior Project Blog 14

I tried to write the first page of Act III today (I have written several pages of the first page) because I suddenly lost inspiration so I watched some Twilight Zone episodes which have been my main source of inspiration for the plot of this script. It started to make me think about maybe cutting the script down to 45 minutes because when I read over all that I have worked on today it somehow started to give me the feeling that cutting down the script from one hour to 40-45 minutes would make it better. This is something that I will have to think deeply about further and discuss with my mentor.