Again and again and again
This is from the " Best of 2009" "challenge" that I am "doing." The original post is here!
December 6 Workshop or conference. Was there a conference or workshop you attended that was especially beneficial? Where was it? What did you learn?
The most amazing educational experience I had in 2009 was my second semester of Revision seminar, which I took in spring of 2009. This was the class where I finally understood what it meant to really revise, rewrite, edit -- in short, to really be a writer. I've always been a skilled writer, and in school there's no doubt that my long, long practice of writing, and especially the discipline of it, helped me tremendously -- I'm definitely one of the fastest writers in my program, able to plan out and crank out a script in a very short period of time. But to really rework a story -- to truly re-envision it -- that was something that I finally learned this year. It helped that I had a magic genie of a professor, a lovely, kind man who some of us called "The Screenplay Whisperer," who could nevertheless be ruthless and tough when I needed it. I learned how the parts of a story and screenplay all connected together -- the promise of the first act, the fulfillment of it in the third, the dynamics of the second act and how they link the two together. I got a true sense this year of exactly how much "story" a film can hold. But more than anything, I learned that the initial act of writing is often like that fabulous romance -- it's exciting, stimulating, but short-lived. It's in the act of rewriting that your relationship to the work becomes like a marriage with all its frustrations and rewards -- you have to look at it clearly, accept the story that it really is and what you really are telling, and then you work and work and work, through a lot of patience and process and dead ends and new surprises, till you make something richer and more true to your original creative impulse. I learned what the rewards of revision are and how gratifying it is to feel your story deepen and get better and closer to the feelings you were trying to capture in the initial writing -- only now there are surprises, and genuine magic in what it has become. I'm still in the middle of it, because I'm such a terribly slow re-writer, but it's definitely been one of the most gratifying, soul-making things to have learned this year for me. I would have to say that this was definitely the year where I felt the true value of my education come to bear, and I'm grateful to have had the chance to learn.