The Office of Letters and Light Blog

I’m a fan of a wonderful little iPhone game called “Fruit Ninja”. Have you heard of it? I’m sure the majority of you have, since it’s always ranked as one of the top 10 apps. Anyway, to get to the point (or to get to a point) I was playing the game today in “Arcade Mode”. It was amazing—I was slashing oranges, apples, and my favorite: watermelons. Then, almost out of nowhere, the highly anticipated yellow-and-red-striped banana appeared. I slashed it and a frenzy began—the “Fruit Frenzy”, that is.

Suddenly my small iPhone screen was being bombarded with fruit. Combo after combo, my score was growing until I surpassed my high score of 892. After a celebratory mental high-five to myself, I had an epiphany: “Fruit Ninja”, and its “Fruit Frenzy” could be used as an analogy for Script Frenzy. 

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Hillary, Script Frenzy ML for New Jersey here. OLL asked me to stop by and talk a little about why my area is so much cooler than… er… I mean, to talk about some of the things we’ve been doing here in the Garden State to keep the Screnzy magic alive throughout the whole month.

Script Frenzy is such a newer event than NaNoWriMo, and many areas (mine included), are really spread out, making it harder for MLs and participants both to feel like they have that same connection with their region, even if local events are less, well, local. I thought I’d share a few things we’ve been doing here in NJ to make our spread out community feel a little more closely knit.

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Way back in the day, when many of us were still young and naive, and all the cows in the world were calves, the Office of Letters and Light had an executive director by the name of Chris Baty, and a Script Frenzy program director moniker-ed Jen Arzt. These storied figures came together for this year’s Frenzy as one mega-writing-team, a scripting Megazord, if you will. Taking time from this meeting of their creative minds, Chris and Jen sent us this missive in which they interview each other about first kisses, wooden eyeballs, and the co-writing process so far:

Chris: This is the first time you’ve collaborated on a screenplay with someone. What important life lessons have you learned from working with me?

Jen: Coffee tastes better with a friend at your table.

Chris: Our screenplay is loosely based on an 1890s ghost story we made up involving a vanishing train and a seven-foot-tall murderer with a wooden eyeball. Neither of us knows anything about trains or wooden eyeballs. What were we thinking?

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A few years ago, while plodding through a revision of my novel (revisions require the writer’s equivalent of heavy-duty hiking boots), I got bored by my writing. It was too literal, too realistic, too earnest, and too flat.

Most writers are all too familiar with this feeling after a red-eyed reading of a draft. I needed a way to literally jar my narrative sensibility. I needed jazz, punk rock, Jackson Pollock, Merce Cunningham, something.

Around this time, I read a quote by Emily Dickinson that remains among my favorite writing advice: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.”

I started reading poetry avidly and discovered that by focusing on the exquisite “slant” poetry offers, the “truth” I was trying to capture became more piquant, surprising, nuanced, playful, and meaningful to me.

So, in honor of National Poetry Month and Poem In Your Pocket Day, here are my 10 reasons prose writers should read—and hopefully write—poetry.

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For all of our events, the Young Writers Program lends NEOs—small word-processing computers—to a few deserving classrooms around the country. We love to check in and hear about their progress. Laura Nicholson, the creative writing teacher at Huntley Project High School in Worden, MT, recently told us about what her students have been working on this April.

Who knew that writing a script could be such a hard process? My students chose to write their scripts in groups, since I have a creative writing class that consists of four sophomores, four juniors, and four seniors. Each class group has screamed, cried, laughed, forced, and written their way through a short film or stage script.

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Have you heard the awesome news? Axe Cop is going to be a TV show! We’re incredibly excited and super happy for Ethan Nicolle, who created our favorite mustachioed officer of the law. Way back when, Ethan wrote a Cameo for Script Frenzy that was chock full of great writing advice, including insight into how to work with an established premise for a script. Not only that, he shared a few more doodles with us, too. Check all of that out below!

I create a comic called Axe Cop with my 5 year old brother, Malachai. He “writes it” and I turn it into a readable comic book. It’s a fun process and when Script Frenzy invited me to do a cameo article I figured this would be a good place to really talk about the process. One thing I want to make clear before I get into this is that I don’t want to take away from the fact that my little brother has a brilliant mind. He is a hilarious kid and he never ceases to amaze me with the things he comes up with. That said, turning a five-year-old’s ideas into something somewhat coherent is an art form all it’s own and it’s one I really have come to enjoy.

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It’s hard not to sound like an internet hipster when I talk about the web. I’ve been a part of message boards and online communities since 1998 or so, and I am a bit prone to rolling my eyes when someone tells me about some newfangled thing they’ve just discovered online that I’ve been doing for the past ten years.

But I had a recent, slightly horrifying realization: I am in danger of going from internet hipster to internet fuddy-duddy. This occurred to me the day I said something along the lines of, “I don’t know about this Tumblr business. What can it do that Twitter can’t?”

Replace Tumblr with, oh, 8-tracks and Twitter with records, and I’m a grouchy old lady wanting to know what’s wrong with how we did things in my day.

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Perhaps it is because we are in the middle of Script Frenzy and amazing industry-insider Cameos abound. Or because I am soliciting pep talks from beloved published authors (six have said “yes!”) to cheer on our November novelists this fall. Or because I am getting married in a few months, and am asking every friend, family member, delivery person, barista, neighbor, shrubber, and companion animal for their sagest relationship advice. Reasons aside, I am noticing a distinct uptick in the amount of interesting, varied, and uniformly valuable advice pouring into my skull on a day-to-day basis.

And that is just the solicited input! You can’t turn on the TV or open your mailbox or hop on the internet without being inundated with platitudes, suggestions, and admonitions for how to do something better, faster, longer, more mindfully, or with greater abandon.

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Last weekend, I had the pleasure of seeing Titanic 3D with a few friends. I was a little apprehensive about sitting through an almost three-and-a-half-hour movie that I’d already seen, but it ended up being well worth the whopping fourteen dollars. It was also my first experience watching a movie in 3D (not including Disneyland’s “Honey I Shrunk the Audience”), and although at first I found the glasses somewhat annoying and the effect a little distracting, I left thinking it was super cool!

The experience of watching Titanic again presented me with an opportunity to revisit something that I had first experienced in my childhood with fresh eyes. Even though I was only seven when Titanic was released, I can still remember “Titanic fever” and how crazy excited I was to see it in theaters with my family. With equal clarity I can recall the crushing disappointment I felt when, after stepping into the theater, my sister realized she was positively too scared to see it, forcing my parents to admit that Titanic was probably a “renter” (but not for them of course, they saw it the next night).

Although this was a blow, I didn’t miss out completely because after my mom saw it she spent the better part of the next morning telling my sisters and I the entire story with impressive accuracy; even James Cameron would have approved of her attention to detail. While she was telling the story I listened with wide eyes, and clung to every word. Even now I’m completely unable to divorce her version of the story from the actual film. I’ll never be able to watch the scene in which Jack teaches Rose how to spit like a man without picturing my mom’s ridiculous impression of Jack hocking a loogie. 

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I’m having a challenging time writing during this Frenzy and I wasn’t sure why until I had a quick chat with our ED, Grant Faulkner. This year I decided to write a feature that is comprised of four shorts linked together by a river. I thought it would be a snap because in my mind it meant that I would avoid the stormy seas of writing the second act of a traditional script. I was wrong. Every single time I sit down to write I feel stuck, and I can’t help but feel a little defeated.

When I mentioned this to Grant he pointed out that it’s probably harder to write four short films than it is to write a 100-page script because I would have to write four beginnings, four middles, and four endings. Bells and whistles went off in my head when I heard those words. In essence I’m doing four mini-Script Frenzy’s this April. I guess it means that I’m a “superstar!” (Said in the voice of Mary Katherine Gallagher.)

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Last night after finishing all of my readings for school I decided to put off writing my script (AGAIN!!) by meticulously cleaning and organizing my bedroom. I live in a very old and extremely strange Berkeley apartment that’s pretty much two bedrooms and a bathroom connected by a narrow hallway with an oven, sink, and refrigerator crammed into it. It is in no way the nicest place I’ve ever lived but as my roommate says, “It’s a one star apartment that we love.” But since we can’t really hang out in our hallway, I end up spending a lot of time in my room so it’s very important to me that it’s clean and comfortable enough for me to eat, sleep, study, and hang out with friends in. But with Script Frenzy upon us, I’m trying to take it a step further by converting my modest bedroom into a chamber of creativity.

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I’ve always been a library lover. Getting my first library card was a momentous occasion, although I proceeded to confuse my mother and the librarian by spending weeks selecting the most random assortment of books possible. (They eventually figured out that I would only pick books that were perfectly square. I wish I could remember my logic for that decision!)

I’ve moved on to books of all shapes and sizes, and the library has been a stalwart companion over the years. These days, I spend a lot of my time working with libraries through our Come Write In program. We partner with libraries all over the world to help give writers a space to find each other, and explore their imaginations, free of charge.

That’s a little bit of magic, I think. A building that offers you the whole world, for free. We’re going to keep working with librarians all over the world for Script Frenzy, NaNoWriMo, and now Camp NaNoWriMo, too. And we’re going to keep going to libraries, too, because everyone needs a little magic in their lives sometimes. 

So celebrate National Library Week with us, and remember that you belong at your library. Stop by your local library for a little bit of magic, and maybe tell them about Come Write In while you’re there.

- Sarah

Photo by Flickr user duncan

So, I know that lying is wrong, but every day when I log in to my Script Frenzy account and still have no more additional pages to add to my count, I have the urge to lie. That’s because on Day 10 I still only have 2 (TWO) pages. There you go; I said it. I have set myself up to be a Script Frenzy failure.

However, in an attempt to be a glass-half-full kind of person, there are still twenty-one days left. If I write about four and a half pages every day, I still have a shot at winning that pretty certificate. The trouble with that is the amount of self-discipline I will need. Or maybe not self-discipline, but concentration and willpower.

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Y’all, I have been working on the ending of a chapter for a month now. The same ending. For a month! Part of the reason it’s dragging on for so long is that I’m falling down on the job of carving out time. Planning a wedding, trying to stay healthy, and running a household after a full day at work makes extra minutes tricky to come by. Well, at least without dinging sleep or hygiene.

But I also know what works for me in terms of my ideal creative environment, and constructing that perfect, maximally productive alchemy for “getting it done” doesn’t just happen at the drop of a hat.

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Sheridan Jobbins is a longtime Script Frenzy and NaNoWriMo participant (As an aside — have we settled on ‘OLL-Star’ as the title for a pan-event writer?). An accomplished screenwriter and producer, she was kind enough to offer a few words during our first week of the Frenzy. Keep an eye out for her Cameo, too!

American general George S. Patton was a dab hand at the epithet. I must view scriptwriting as a battle, because I find myself quoting him – a lot.  Today’s quote (the one to kick off Script Frenzy) is, “Accept the challenges so that you can feel the exhilaration of victory.”

In order for you to experience the exhilaration of completing your first screenplay, there are a few things you’ll need:

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In addition to the many generous donations we receive online, we always get a few contributions mailed to the office. The best part about these is that they’re often accompanied by a great letter from the donor. The other day, we got the note below from Robin, a middle schooler from Washington State who’s been inspired by the YWP.

Dear OLL,

Thank you so much for creating NaNoWriMo, Script Frenzy and the YWP. If you hadn’t created them I wouldn’t love writing as much as I do now. I know you work very hard keeping the sites safe and awesome. Because I had a lot of fun noveling last November I felt confident enough to help out at my local middle school’s Beauty and the Beast stage production (I’m helping out backstage with sets and props). Doing that has also encouraged me to write my own script.

The pictures are of my gerbils Aspen (the single gerbil in the larger photo with a whit spot on her head), Hazel (the orange gerbil drinking water) and Eclipse (the black gerbil who is trying to push Hazel out of the way for her own turn to drink water). And most importantly, the $25 donation to keep the fabulous writing going!

– Robin

This morning my best friend sent me an email inquiring about my new job at The Office of Letters and Light, and then promptly retracted her inquiry, realizing that it must be a branch of the Ministry of Magic and discretion should be honored (though she also mentioned how jealous she was that I get to have run-ins with Harry, Ron, and Hermione). I can’t think of a better segue to my introduction as this perfectly describes my excitement to be a part of OLL!

My name is Kristen and I am OLL’s new Development Associate. While my primary focus will be grant writing, I’m hoping to tap into my long-lost creative side in the process. I currently attend the University of San Francisco, and am working towards a Masters in Public Affairs and Practical Politics, with a concentration in Nonprofits and Policy. As you can imagine, most of my writing these days is very dry. Nonetheless, it serves a wonderful purpose that I become more passionate about everyday.

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I have this theory that music can influence your mood, and in turn, influence your writing. Has anyone done a study on this? If not, I’d love to be a test subject.

The majority of the time I tend to stray away from listening to music while writing creative pieces. However, once in a while, I find a song that perfectly fits the mood I’m trying to convey. Most recently that song was “Breathe Me” by Sia. It’s a sad, but breathtaking tune that really helped push an emotionally complex short story I was working on. I don’t even know how many times that song looped through my headphones during my writing process. I just know that the song was a perfect mood-setter.

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And we’re off, folks! Script Frenzy has officially kicked off, and we here at the office think it’s pretty awesome that we got to start with a weekend in order to build up a great head start. Sandra Salas, Script Frenzy Program Director, has a rousing “welcome back” for all y’all, and if you want to share your favorite motivators for the month in our forums or right here, we’d love to hear!

And now, back to our scripts, and inciting incidents galore…