Jo Hannah Afton | Screenwriter

Writing and Birthing

Sun, 18 Dec 2016 08:21:01 -0800

I've got several projects in development right now and it occurs to me that writing a screenplay is very much like having a baby, and raising a child.

The writer is like Momma, she gestates for nine months... creation is at work, but its all happening inside her, often unseen by anyone. The writer paces and ponders, and lets creativity do it's thing through a combination of subconscious and divine magic.

Labor begins... outlining and working through the basic structure... it's a short but painful process, and she can't wait for the baby to be born, anticipation is unbearable, but the labor must precede the birth. It's the natural law of good writing.

Then the first draft is born -- in a messy, bloody, painful but glorious victory, the baby is delivered. The writer thinks the baby is perfect, but really, the work of parenting is just beginning.

For the next year, she breastfeeds, comforts, loves and nurtures this new life with multiple rewrites. But it's still her baby. She cleaves to it, protects it, and accepts help, but only in small doses.

Meanwhile, the father -- our producer (and perhaps the original seed donor haha) -- is there to hold her hand, to help, to make suggestions. But God help him if he tries to micro-manage her during the birthing and breastfeeding process! He must be gentle and judicious in his suggestions and let her do what comes naturally.

It's not until the child is ready to walk that she lets the producer step in and become a full partner in the process. Then ... Momma is ready to let him help her teach the child to walk, to talk, to read, to ride a bike. Now, they are full parenting partners. Everything is negotiated, everything is discussed in detail. It takes a long time. There are arguments. But if they are good parents, they both listen to each other and smooth out their disagreements.

If they're going to get divorced, this is when it happens (the deadbeat producers usually leave the scene...Read More

THE PROBLEM WITH WOMEN WRITERS

Fri, 09 Sep 2016 08:02:01 -0700

Slated put together a comprehensive look at the film industry gender gap and came up with a surprising answer to why female driven films under perform. The answer will surprise you.

It's not quality of writing. It's not return on investment. And it's not a smaller pool of film talent. It's distribution. That's all. Female driven content outperforms male-centered stories financially, but distributors are showing them on fewer screens. It's a trust gap that happens when distributors decide which films they will show on how many screens. The "glass ceiling" is occurring in the minds of the people that are bidding on films at festivals.

Time for women to push harder into the distribution chain of command?

From the Slated research:

"Women Writers seem particularly shortchanged: Their scripts achieve the highest ROI of any category and yet their work commands two-thirds of the average budgets given to Male Writers. This imbalance becomes particularly egregious for films budgeted at more than $25 million, a category in which Women Writers achieve an industry-high ROI of 3.72 and yet account for just 8.7% of theatrically released screenplays.

Even though male writers generate considerably more theatrical material than women writers, the market potential for their screenplays is essentially the same. The tiny difference in their Slated SCRIPT SCORES, an industry-weighted measure of a script’s quality that is derived from the year-adjusted performance analysis of 191 screenplays, does not come close to the imbalance in their script production volumes. For Male Writers that score is 78.0; for Female Writers it is 76.6."

See the full infographic, and read the hard numbers here >>> http://info.slated.com/data-exposes-gender-fault-lines-infographic/

I don't know what I don't know.

Fri, 26 Aug 2016 09:04:13 -0700

Ignorance. It takes many forms.

As a writer, it's a constant balance of writing what I know, from my personal experience, and writing what I don't know, to create worlds and characters that live outside my personal experience. Research means hours of Google usually, watching other films, reading books, articles, or maybe -- horrors -- leaving the house and traveling to some unknown place.

But, there are some things that can't be learned through casual exposure. For instance, I can write about an aged person in a nursing home, and I can learn what a typical nursing home looks like, and operates. I can even take a visit to a local nursing home and learn what it smells like, feels like and what kind of atmosphere is soaked into the walls. But there is one thing I cannot know, and that is what it feels like to be an elderly person who spends all my time there. I don't know how time, boredom, sickness, dementia, and abuse might affect the way I see the world and those around me. I don't know what it feels like to expect a visit from a child after months of loneliness. You feel me?

I can IMAGINE, I can CREATE -- but I cannot KNOW. And there IS a difference. It's the basis of what they mean when they tell us writers to 'write what you know.' But unless you are writing an autobiography of sorts, there will always be elements of our stories that are written from a perspective that we don't know. It's unavoidable.

Some of what we bring to the page is instinctual. Some of it is cerebral. Left brain. Right brain. I think good writing comes equally from both sides of our brains. Emotional. Creative. Intuitive writing, combined with logical, detailed, structured thinking. However, I think great writing... award winning, timeless stories, come from the right brain. Sure, we can all imagine what it's like to be a different age, a foreigner in a new country, the opposite gender or a different race than our own, and tell ourselves that what we are...Read More

Is your script ready to send out?

Fri, 05 Aug 2016 08:33:55 -0700

Congratulations! You finished that first draft. You agonized over the rewrites. You got coverage. Your Mom loves it. But will THEY love it? You know who I'm talking about.

The producers. It's a agonizing moment.

We've all been there. It's ready. It's not ready. It's brilliant! I'm a genius! Wait. This is crap! I can't send it out.

The endless feedback loop in our own heads does nothing to reassure us that what we have in our script is ready to be read... by anyone. It's a big risk, sending that script out, and you want to be sure that you don't blow perhaps your only shot with a producer or agent when they (finally) agree to read your work. Make sure it will stand up to professional scrutiny by using this checklist. It is taken mainly from the Academy Nichol's Screenplay Contest coverage that their readers use, and a few extra items from Chris Soth's Mini Movie Method Class (which I use to write) and a few extras from Screenwriting U's ProSeries rewrite suggestions. Hope it's helpful for you!

THE FEMALE PROTAGONIST:Please don't MAN WASH us!

Fri, 12 Feb 2016 08:00:00 -0800

Have to say -- I'm giddy that there are people talking about female protagonists, how to write them, and how to introduce them in a script. However, I want to weigh in on something that continues to irk me every time I see it. Namely, that if you don't know how to write a female protagonist, just 'flip the gender' and voila! Kick ass female protagonist.

I liken this strategy to those ridiculous pantsuits with shoulder pads from the 1970s in corporate America. Besides being oddly fugly, they just ring false.

Women are women. Not men. Women have a unique set of traits, abilities, mannerisms and a perspective on life and relationships that is unique to their gender. This is not to say that there isn't some cross-over, but in most cases, growing up female in a male dominated culture puts women in a position to see things differently... we learn different coping mechanisms, different strategies to get what we want. We also have different brains, different bodies, different physiological reactions to stress... this has all been proven scientifically.

So, no. You can't just give your male protagonist a vagina and call it a day. Compelling female characters do not need to be "kick ass" in order to be heroic. They don't need to pull a pistol out of a shoulder holster to solve a problem, nor do they need to have masculine personality traits in order to be respected.

And, just to be clear -- making your female characters androgynous as a way of making them heroic, is actually very insulting to women. The underlying message of this technique (Hello Star Wars) is that in order to be heroic, a woman must denounce her feminine nature. Rubbish I say!

SIDENOTE: Acknowledging a woman's femininity does not just mean accentuating her sexuality (which is fine to do as well, but a woman's...Read More