The Office of Letters and Light Blog

A Frenzied Festival of Plays

Educator Cynthia Garcia doesn’t just teach noveling or scriptwriting to one class at her school in Fairmont, WV. She brings both NaNoWriMo and Script Frenzy to the whole student body. We always love her enthusiasm and were excited to hear how her April went. Here’s what she told us about the school’s first ever “Frenzy Festival.”

April was pretty chaotic at our school. Between Easter break, spring break, standardized testing, and “weather days” (Fridays off of school to substitute for the snow days we had built into our calendar but didn’t use), we only had a handful of actual school days all month.

Two years ago, I might have figured April for a lost month, but that was before two NaNoWriMos and a Script Frenzy. I knew better. I put up my “Script Frenzy is Coming!” posters in March, sent for my classroom kit, and let the buzz begin.

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Your Friendly Neighborhood Script Frenzy-Hero

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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NEO-Driven YWP Frenziers!

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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Axe Cop: Classic Cameo by Ethan Nicolle

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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The Exhilaration of Victory

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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Dear OLL

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

What Script-Writers Can Learn from Improv (Part Two!)

David Alger, of the Pan Theater in Oakland, returns to share more tips for beginners in improv, which are super applicable for script-writers, too! (A quick update on Operation: Liberate Laughter, Animal Control says the space we were going to repurpose for our first show isn’t “safe”, and that the raccoons there have “mutated”, but you know what? I think what they meant is “isn’t safe for HUMOR”, and “mutated to develop FUNNY BONES”. Whoo, the show is back on!)

Yesterday’s tips are here.

5. Be Specific - Provide Details!

Details are the lifeblood of moving a scene forward. Each detail provides clues to what is important. Details help provide beat objectives and flesh out characters.

• Example One: You’re the best brain surgeon in all of West Valley, Mark. That’s why I chose you to operate on mom.

Rather than:

• You’re the best doctor in this town, which is why I chose you.

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What Script-Writers Can Learn from Improv

We recently spoke with David Alger, the producing director at Pan Theater in Oakland, in our ongoing efforts to pull together the OLL Comedy Troupe (tentatively known as Operation: Liberate Laughter. Staff has been generally unenthusiastic, and public interest is low, and the budget is nil, but none of that matters right now! Everything’s going to be awesome!). He generously provided these tips for improv beginners, which we think are fantastically relevant for script-writing, too. Read on!

Improv is an art. However, it is also a craft. A craft is something that is learned throgh practice, repetition, trial, error and hard work. Much like any other art (including writing!), skill in improv is acquired over time. The more time spent improv-ing the greater the improvement (pun intended).

That being said, there are rules which can, in general, make a scene better.

As with any art form, you can break all of the rules and still have quality scenes. However, those best able to break the rules are those who first learn and understand them.

So, let’s look at some of the basic rules of improv:

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Great Graphic Novel Resources

In addition to being an esteemed OLL board member, our own Elizabeth Gregg is also a graphic novelist—not only during Script Frenzy, but throughout the rest of the year. She’s currently scripting a full-length epic about 600-year-old assassins, which she hopes to finish in the near future. We asked Elizabeth for her favorite comic writing resources for beginners.

The first and most important piece of advice I have is: Read scripts. Read as many of them as you can get your hands on. The reason this is important is that, unlike a film script that tends to be very regimented structurally, comic scripts vary widely depending on the writer, the artist, and the publisher. You can use your favorite search engine to find specific scripts, but The Comic Book Script Archive is also a good resource to get you started.

Here are some other resources I’ve found helpful over the past two years I’ve been working on my comic. A lot of these discoveries have been the result of flailing about, just hoping to find ideas to help me unlock both the structure and freedoms of the comic form. I do not pretend to be an expert, just an enthusiastic amateur.

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Revision and Reading Aloud

Today is World Read Aloud Day, and we hope you’re able to make time to share the power of the written word with somebody. We think it’s especially impactful to read the words that you’ve written. And If you’re not yet ready to share them, we’ve got an idea: reading them aloud to yourself as a revision technique. Writing scholar Peter Elbow shares the effect of this approach in an excerpt from his new book, Vernacular Eloquence: What Speech Can Bring to Writing.

If people read aloud carefully each sentence they’ve written and then keep revising or fiddling with the words till they feel right in the mouth and sound right in the ear, the resulting sentence will be clear and strong. This is a bold claim. For skeptics I formulate it more rigorously: the resulting sentence will be much clearer and much stronger than if the writer relied only on an understanding of what sentences are supposed to look like—that is, relied only on knowledge of rules or principles.

Of course “clear and strong” is not the same as “correct.” “Aint nobody don’t use double negatives.” This is a strong clear sentence—and true. And plenty of people hear no problem with “between her and I.” So there’s still a need for final copy editing for surface features like spelling and grammar and perhaps register—and this copy editing requires knowledge that the mouth and ear don’t have. But the goal of revising by mouth and ear is not “correct grammar” but clarity and strength. The process is about meaning, not propriety.

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February is Pitchapalooza!

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Jane Sevier: A Perspective on Revision

Jane Sevier completed the first draft of Fortune’s Fool during NaNoWriMo 2008. After revision and publication, the novel was a finalist in the Romance Writers Association’s Golden Heart Awards. In this article (originally published on the Moody Muses blog), Jane discusses her post-NaNo process and how she built the book from the bones up. What lessons have you learned from your own revisions?

You made it through NaNoWriMo with your 50K or however many words. Then the holidays came along to distract you and let you recover a little while those words lay fallow for six weeks.

So, now what? If you’re like me, you’re itching to look back at what poured out of you in November. Or what you extracted with forceps and one foot braced against the desk. However those words arrived on the page, enough time has passed to give you a fresh perspective.

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