The Screenwriting Life with Meg LeFauve and Lorien McKenna

Today, we do one of our favorite things: answer YOUR questions. As is always the case, a theme emerged across your questions and our conversation, which boils down to one of the hardest and most important questions we face as artists. How are we supposed to feel validated in our work, especially when it's hard?

Don't forget to join us for our FINAL DRAFT in Austin this year on Saturday evening at Stephen F's Bar & Terrace after our workshop. We are so exciting to be partnering with Final Draft!

JOIN OUR PATREON: www.patreon.com/thescreenwritinglife

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

TSL was on set this week! (Exciting - more soon)...but because our bandwidth was stretched a bit thin, we're going to be rebroadcasting a fan favorite: the lava episode!

There may be no topic we discuss more on this show than lava, so we decided to put an episode together unpacking the entire volcano.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Austin Film Festival is known for many things — but few are as legendary as its annual 90-Second Pitch Competition, where writers have just 90 seconds to share their stories. In Hollywood, we call that “the elevator pitch” — and it’s more essential than ever.

To unpack what makes a pitch truly land, we’re joined by an incredible lineup: TSL veteran and producer Sheila Hanahan Taylor, Austin Film Festival’s Screenplay Director Alyssa Alvarado, and five brave writers who step up to pitch their hearts out.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There is nothing worse than writer's block when facing a rewrite, but there's hope! Today we discuss 6 Essential Strategies To Tackle a Rewrite.

JOIN OUR PATREON: www.patreon.com/thescreenwritinglife

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We're back for part two w/ super producer Ted Hope! This week, we talk about some of Ted's top pieces of advices for living a successful creative life, and spend a long time talking about the importance of balancing multiple projects as a creative.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You finally get the meeting, make the connection, and a bigshot producer is excited to read your script. But you panic. Is it good enough? Is it READY? Today, award-winning independent film producer Ted Hope walks us through those always complicated questions, and answers TONS more along the way.

FOR MORE: https://tedhope.substack.com

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Every writer can point to a movie that made them say: "THIS. This is what I want to do." And today, Meg, Lorien, and Jeff share the movies that turned THEM into writers. Yep, we're movie nerds too.

JOIN OUR PATREON: www.patreon.com/TheScreenwritingLIfe

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Though it can sometimes feel like a prison, screenplay structure is actually a very freeing element of the story process. Jill Chamberlain, a veteran script consultant, is obsessive about structure, to the point where she has created a popular technique to re-consider how we approach our work. On her technique, producer Callum Greene (Star Wars Episode 9) offers “the Nutshell Technique is like the Rosetta Stone: it cracks the code behind why we love the movies that we love. It goes way beyond tired old beat sheet ‘formulas’ and instead guides you to organically write the story you want to tell.”

FOR MORE ON JILL (& FREE NUTSHELL WORKSHEETS): https://www.jillchamberlain.com

TO JOIN OUR PATREON: www.patreon.com/thescreenwritinglife

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As collaborators and showrunners, Kat Likkel and John Hoberg know that shutting down ideas is never helpful. This was only emphasized when they joined Pixar's Elemental team as writers. Today we discuss how to collaborate well with others (and ourselves), how to bring our personal experience into our work, and duckboat. Yes, you read that right: duckboat.

Join Our Patreon: www.patreon.com/TheScreenwritingLife

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

**PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS EPISODE WAS PRE-RECORDED & PRECEDED THE 2023 WGA STRIKE.**

In today's TSL epsiode, Meg gets personal about her lava, and how a recent production of Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George is helping her to rethink the beauty of moving on from a creative project.

JOIN OUR PATREON: www.patreon.com/thescreenwritinglife

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices