Building Upon an Old Holiday Tradition

It's Christmas. Sort of. I haven't gone to bed yet, so even though it is the 26th, it's still Christmas to me.

My daughter and I have a special tradition of spending a weekend in the City during the holiday season to finish up - or start - our holiday shopping. (For those not from the bay area, the "City" is San Francisco.)

But it's really more than that. It's time for us to talk and reconnect without the haze of day-t0-day demands. This year, we talked about collaborating on a writing project. She writes short-stories with incredible characters - yet with more starts than finishes. I've wanted to try a screenwriting project that is outside my comfort zone, and something for a teen audience might be it...

As we talked, she shared the first 6 pages of a new story she's working on. It's a kind of Jason Bourne meets Agent Cody Banks from a female perspective. I loved it! At 16, she has an uncanny ability to bring her characters alive with dialogue that is so natural - I doubt she ever agonizes for just the right word. Yet when she writes, she doesn't know quite where she's heading. That's where we had great fun as we tried out different motives and backdrops for her characters to shine...

Our plan is for each of us to take the opening set-up and run with it. It will be interesting to see where we both end up and IF there is some way to mesh the two unfolding dramas.

Imagine if every December we embark on a similar creative effort... Hmmm.

SB

Challenge Accepted!

I'm entering a new world here... Thinking I was just responding to Scott's challenge to read 14 scripts in 14 days, I am now an official blogger with an official site. How cool!

To Scott: I was one of your students back in 2005 when you were awarded "Best On-Line Instructor" at UCLA. What a ride! I finished the script from that class, and then, through the rewrite process - while fully absorbing your comments, thoughts and wisdom - turned the story completely around by drawing into a 6 month period of time of my protagonist's life (the original script covered five years or more of his life!)

So now that I'm between scripts, I'm up for challenge (thank goodness you kept the link up even though you first posted it in July!) As an add-on to this challenge, do you ever provide your students with not so great scripts to read and learn from? To see if we have what it takes to play "script doctor"?

Catch you later -
SB