How can you pick yourself, rather than wait for someone else to pick you? How can you take control of your independent career and bring your creative vision to life? Jeffrey Crane Graham talks about his experience as an indie filmmaker, with lots of tips for indie authors.

In the intro, 6 Types of Submission Comments BookBub Editors Love to See [BookBub]; Author platform is not a requirement to sell your novel or children’s book [Jane Friedman]; Your Author Business Plan and/or Business for Authors 50% off with discount coupon PLAN on CreativePennBooks.com; Spear of Destiny; Ruby Roe rainbow foil hardcover Kickstarter; Updated Author Blueprint coming soon; I’m interviewed on writing memoir [QWERTY Podcast].

Today’s show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to www.draft2digital to get started.

Jeffrey Crane Graham is a writer, director, and podcast producer. He wrote and directed the multi-award-winning film Always, Lola, and has also written comedy shorts. He produces and co-hosts The Screenwriting Life podcast.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

• Choosing yourself, rather than waiting for someone to pick you
• The process of creating a micro-budget feature
• Writing screenplays that are “practically shootable”
• Tips for authors who want to get their books on screen
• Marketing a film in a crowded market
• How the film festival circuit works for indie filmmakers
• Possible uses of AI in the filmmaking process that are not the act of creation

You can find Jeffrey at JeffGrahamDigital.com. You can find Always Lola at AlwaysLolaFilm.com.

Transcript of Interview with Jeffrey Crane Graham

Joanna: Jeffrey Crane Graham is a writer, director, and podcast producer. He wrote and directed the multi-award-winning film Always, Lola, and has also written comedy shorts. He produces and co-hosts The Screenwriting Life podcast. So welcome to the show, Jeff.

Jeffrey: Thanks, Jo. I’m honored to be on the show. As I told you before we went on air, I’m a fan of your podcast. So I am glad to be here.

Joanna: Oh, good. Well, lots to talk about. First up—

Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into screenwriting and film.

Jeffrey: So I’m from Cleveland, Ohio. I feel like I got especially interested in writing in middle school, I was writing a lot of short stories. Then I feel like in high school, I got the ambitious idea of like, “I’m going to try to write a novel.” That’s something I would still like to do before I die.

I always think of novelists as like real writers, and screenwriters are aspirational novelists. Just because the idea of a novel, I think, is so intimidating.

The idea to first kind of start writing for film and TV—I think most screenwriters can point to a movie that feels pretty definitional for them—I think for me, that would have been Little Miss Sunshine. It was the first movie I watched where I really subconsciously thought, somebody wrote this.

I feel like film culture, especially feature films, are so built around the idea of directors being the author of the movie. Whereas I’m always most interested in who penned the script.

Little Miss Sunshine, I remember watching it and specifically loving the dialogue and the twists with the characters that you learned throughout the journey. I distinctly had the realization that somebody literally wrote words on a page that these actors are saying, and I have to know who that writer is.

Of course, that writer is Michael Arndt, who in such a cool full circle way I got to interview on the show I co-host, The Screenwriting Life. I did my best to maintain professionalism as I told him he was one of my heroes.

Then from there, I just started writing more and more scripts. I ended up optioning a half hour pilot, which kind of got me excited to move to Los Angeles. And here I am now talking about my debut feature film, which is called Always, Lola.

Joanna: A few things I want to follow up on there. First of all, it’s so interesting, you talk there about when you notice the writer. I was just thinking about the TV show Succession, which I love.

Jeffrey: It’s one of the best of all time.

Joanna: Yes, and the dialogue is so good. It’s so cutting. It’s the most violent family dialogue, but not in a violent way. You know what I mean?

Jeffrey: Of course, yes.

Joanna: It’s one of those shows where I’m, like, wow, these writers are really good. Then the other example I was thinking of recently, we were watching season two of Reacher the TV show. Season one—I don’t even know if this is true—but we were like season one had great writing, season two had terrible writing.

Jeffrey: Interesting. It happens.

Joanna: It’s interesting because often we don’t think about the screenwriter, or the screenwriting team. When you were saying that, it’s really the first time I’ve thought about—

When do you really notice the writer, as opposed to the director?

Jeffrey: Well, it is interesting. I’ll talk about Succession. I don’t know as much about Reacher. It’s funny because television is also an interesting one, and I’ll get to this, but it’s so collaborative that sometimes you’re not sure if it’s the studio, or the directors, or the showrunner, or someone in that room. That’s true of movies as well.

I think with Succession especially, Jesse Armstrong had had such a long career as a comedy writer. I don’t know if you’re a Peep Show fan…

Joanna: No.

Jeffrey: Great, great show. He co-created that with a writer I admire named Sam Bain.

Since he had worked so long, specifically in more comedy zones, I think Succession was such an interesting synthesis of it’s a hilarious show, like you mentioned, and the dialogue is so cutting and brutal. It’s also this Shakespearean look at the intensity of family, and legacy, and living up to the impossible standards that your parents set for you.

Interestingly, Jesse Armstrong hired a ton of playwrights for that show. So a lot of the writers room came from acclaimed, under-seen, like West End plays. So because I think playwriting is so dialogue-heavy and Jesse Armstrong has talked about the influence of Shakespeare on his work, maybe that’s why the writing especially stands out.

I also think, interestingly, I think when you look at playwriting — 

The playwright is usually considered the author of the work. Whereas in screenwriting, sometimes the director is considered the author of the work.

I’ve always kind of objected to that.

Joanna: Yes, that is interesting. So from the big TV shows and the big films, and you describe Always, Lola as a micro-budget feature. So just explain a bit more about that. Like, did you do absolutely everything?

Tell us about the process of getting that done.

Jeffrey: I did a lot of it, I will say. I want to be careful to make sure I’m giving credit to all the departments who helped on the film.

It is interesting with your first feature, so much of it is just kind of pulling the cart yourself and getting it over the finish line.

Budgetarily, and I’m happy to talk about this, it’s a big part of your show. I would say like 80% of the budget, which for production was somewhere between $20,000 – $30,000, was my own savings, with probably 20% of that coming from producers.

Then once we got into post production there were some additional costs that come up from editing and color correction and sound. So financially, a lot of it is my own investment.

I mean, obviously, I wrote the script. I was a huge part of getting the movie cast. I did write for a number of actors that I already knew who were sort of in development with me before we even decided to put it up on its feet.

For some of the characters, I cast them in a very traditional way. I did it by reaching out to agencies through my production company email that I founded to put the movie together, and I cast that in a traditional way.

I think it’s really important to credit my director of photography, a brilliant DP named AJ Young. I think this was his 11th feature. I think like the look and the way the movie is lit, I worked very closely in tandem with him. He has a ton of experience on big budget movies all the way down to these sort of scrappy micro-budget films.

So he really understood how to work with the budget we have to make it look as good as it could. So I will credit him, but in terms of the other departments and post production, most of it was just me.

Joanna: Yes, and that’s why I guess we’re talking, really, is that you’re an indie filmmaker. You’ve done it on this $20,000 to $30,000, which was your savings, and obviously a lot of your time, and your relationships, and all these things you put into it. So this is a labor of love.

Tell us about the idea behind the film.

Like what possessed you to do this?

Jeffrey: Yes, totally. I’ll talk from a personal perspective first and then practical perspective second. The story is kind of a feel-good coming-of-age dramedy. A lot of critics have mentioned the movie The Big Chill, which was a big inspiration for me as I was writing.

I love Lawrence Kasdan, and in general, I sort of love 80s hangout ensemble dramedies. Like The Big Chill, or The Breakfast Club, or pretty much anything that John Hughes was doing in the 80s. I think it’s harder and harder to find character-driven dramedies. They were so popular, and they’ve kind of gone away.

So I bring that up because the movie is loosely inspired by the death of my best friend from high school. The movie follows these five best friends who are reuniting on their annual camping trip to mourn the loss of their friend who used to throw that trip. But on this trip, obviously she’s not here because she died the year before.

As they kind of talk and discover secrets around her death during the trip, it threatens to not only destroy their friend group, but their memory of her and their understanding of their own mortality. I think it is a really important coming of age moment.

I always say that losing a parent or a grandparent is a very specific kind of grief, but losing a peer, especially as a teenager, is a very different kind of grief. I think most people can point to that first moment they lost someone who was their age. So that’s really kind of what the movie is about.

From a practical perspective, it’s funny —

I’d written this draft with the intention of really writing and putting together a low-budget, practically shootable film.

It was with the idea of either giving it to a producer or sort of pitching it out as something that could be made on a really low budget.

This was all kind of happening as the pandemic was really reaching its peak. Obviously, the pandemic was horrible, but if we wanted to look at one silver lining, I do think it forced a lot of us, especially creatives, to assess why they were really living their life, you know, as things were slowing down for them.

My wife actually looked at me, and she was like, okay, as things have slowed down and we’re sort of taking a 30,000-foot view of our own life, we have two options here. One of them is to grow old in a nursing home and be 95 and still talking about the movie we never made. The other option is to just try to figure it out ourselves and see what happens.

Both of those sound really, really hard, but I actually think the regretful one sounds much harder. So we have to make the other hard choice. That was the moment when we decided to kind of go all in.

Joanna: So first of all, I love this phrase, “practically shootable,” because I have written a few screenplays and adapted some of my own work. I did one for a pilot with my Mapwalkers as kind of a feature, and I pitched it to an agent and they said, “Oh, this is like $100 million.”

I was like, okay. He asked if I can write something cheaper and, I guess, more effective.

What does “practically shootable” mean if people want to write screenplays or books that might get adapted?

Jeffrey: That’s a great question, and I kind of have a two-pronged answer for this, if that’s okay. It’s funny, a lot of studio-working screenwriters would say that when you approach the page as someone who wants to get into the system and maybe be selling your work or getting staffed on a TV show, you shouldn’t be thinking about budget as you approach the page.

Instead, you should just be writing the sample that feels like most true to your voice and version of you as a writer that you can.

But I think there’s also another prong that’s kind of increasingly important to think about. That is if you plan on producing your own work, especially early in your career, and I think it used to be, sort of like in the old days of Hollywood, that you could build your career on just a sample, and it would get bought and sold, and then you’d be in the system.

More and more, especially for feature film writers, especially writer-directors, their debut is more self-produced.

You know, the 90s, I look at filmmakers like Robert Rodriguez and Kevin Smith, and even recently, Lena Dunham, her early work was self-produced on a micro-budget.

There’s a filmmaker I like a lot named Cooper Raiff who just won a big award at Sundance a couple years ago. His first feature was self-produced for like 16 grand.

There’s a really exciting filmmaker named Emma Seligman. She had a movie come out this year called Bottoms that I think is like one of the best of the year from last year. Her debut feature film, Shiva Baby, is also kind of a masterpiece, and that was self-produced.

So I bring all of that up because it’s more and more of a viable way to launch your career as an indie filmmaker to start, which then gets you those meetings and gets you into the system to pitch your more expensive movie.

So when you’re thinking about a practically shootable film, you do want to be thinking about budget, and you want to be thinking about what you can actually do to get your film up on its feet and kind of not shoot outside of your means.

So things like limiting your locations. You know, locations are by far one of the most expensive elements of a feature film. It’s called a company move when you ask your entire production, cast, crew, wardrobe, craft, food, to move to a new location. Obviously on a production, time is money. So the less you can be moving around, the better.

So I encourage feature filmmakers, especially micro-budget feature filmmakers, to think about these sort of 50k or less movies as their own kind of genre and look at them as a case study.

What are the commonalities? Usually it’s a small cast, limited location, not a ton of set pieces, maybe a juicy character-driven theme.

If you’re interested in this, I actually do teach a five-part course on what it means to write, produce, edit, and distribute a micro-budget film. I’ve become obsessive about this. So I’ll include the link to that class in the description below if you’re interested in taking it.

Joanna: Oh, great. We can add that in at the end.

What’s funny is after I did pitch this expensive thing, I did end up writing a horror micro-budget. So I wrote a novella, it’s called Catacomb, and I also wrote the screenplay alongside it. I made a pitch pack and all of this, and then I haven’t done anything at all with it.

I guess I’m scared. I have booked a place at the PitchFest in a couple of months, but I am a little scared about doing it.

What are your thoughts for authors who want to get their books on screen but don’t necessarily want to adapt them themselves?

Jeffrey: I totally understand that screenwriting is a totally different medium and craft than novel writing. Similarly, like the idea of adapting my debut feature into a novel is uninteresting to me, to be totally honest. So I understand that.

First of all, I think you’re smart to be looking at horror as a practical way to put a micro-budget film up on its feet. They’re usually the most lucrative when it comes to these low budgets. Of course, the two most famous versions of micro-budget feature films are The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity.

So I think what I would do is look for other super low budget films that might feel similar in tone or look or story to yours and look at who’s producing on those. You’ve got to think, those producers are also at the beginning of their career, and they want to keep their train on the track as well.

So looking at those names, going to IMDb, or IMDb Pro especially, and see if you can find a contact or way to reach out. Then just sending a little email over and saying, “I love your work.” First of all, flattery is one of the most important ways to make a good connection with someone.

Be honest about what you loved about their material, and let them know, “Hey, I’m a novelist. I have this IP. It’s well reviewed, and I think it could make a great feature. Would you ever want to get a coffee and just talk about it?”

I would say 99% of the time, these upcoming producers will at least take the meeting because you’ve got to remember, their job is to get work made and they want to keep their name on projects. So it’s a mutually beneficial relationship.

I think it’s so easy to think about producers as the bad guys or like the scary sort of dark arts element of film production, but they are creatives too. Remember, they got into this business because they’re in love with storytelling in a different way. So reach out, you never know what will happen.

Joanna: It’s interesting you say that because there’s also a lot of—I say horror again—but horror stories amongst the author community. There’s a book called Hollywood Vs. The Author, where there are stories of authors who’ve done this. You know, they’ve sent things in, and then films have been made. There are court cases, and you must be careful of contracts because you might get ripped off.

I feel like on the one hand, there’s a lot of hope, which means there are a lot of rip off things.

Then there’s also a lot of fear around what could happen in a bad way. Or even, I guess people look at films that are made of books that they love, and they say, “Oh, it was terrible. It ruined everything.”

Where’s the balance between Hollywood being full of sharks and the hope of making something?

Jeffrey: It’s hard. I don’t want to sound like a pessimist on the show, but I think it is an interesting moment in terms of TV and film because the industry at large is not quite as lucrative as it used to be.

Everyone, from indie filmmakers to big studios, are trying to figure out how they can continue to keep the business as financially viable as they can.

Streaming has been good in a lot of ways, and it’s created a lot of jobs for people, but the big lesson over the last 10 years is that it’s not profitable.

So something needs to change.

I think I say all that because I think like the big $500,000 spec script sale for a first-time writer, it’s not really happening anymore. So I think like there is an element of adjusting your expectations and knowing that for your first film, especially, you might not be doing it as much for the big paycheck.

It’s more for the chance to really launch your career, get your work and your voice up on screen, and use that as a chance to start doing bigger and bigger things. There are some red flags, however, that I would really look out for.

One of them is if a producer is asking you to pay them to take your work out. That’s a no, no, no. A producer is invested and on your team. So both of you are looking to benefit and profit from the idea of your work.

That should be the producer is expecting to make money later down the road. When the movie gets sold, there will be a writer deal and a producer deal, and both of you will benefit from that. The producer should not benefit until someone is paying both of you, if that makes sense. So that’s a big red flag.

Also, keep the rights.

If a producer is asking him for like 5% of the rights of the material or whatever, that’s also a no go. Whatever it takes, hold onto those rights.

Other than that, I think $1 option agreement, where a producer will pay you $1 to get the right to go shop it around. That’s not super uncommon.

If you’re an unknown, I’d say just be limited about the number of time on that option. Maybe it’s six months, maybe it’s a year, whatever, but that’s not necessarily fishy when it comes to early in your career.

Joanna: Yes, it’s interesting. You mentioned that things are not as they used to be. It’s the same in traditional publishing. The market is very crowded for all of us as creatives. So given that you’re an indie filmmaker—

How are you reaching film lovers in such a crowded market? What have you done in terms of marketing?

Jeffrey: You know, of course, podcasts! I’m grateful to be here with you now.

I do hope in your audience that there are some interested aspiring filmmakers. I think you’ll like the movie, but it’s also worth checking out as a case study to see what you can do for $30,000. As I mentioned, I think it’s important to be studying this if you want to do it yourself.

This is a question that indie filmmakers are asking, but this is also a question that big studios are asking.

Michael Mann released a movie this year called Ferrari. Of course, he’s one of the highest grossing directors of all time, and the movie is just not doing well. It’s interesting, because it’s the kind of movie that would be like guaranteed gangbusters in the 90s.

So I think we’re all competing for attention. I think a lot of people are using their free time and their leisure time to be on social media.

So I think the best way to get people interested in your work is to try to make organic human connections and build a community of your own.

I’m sure, Jo, a ton of your listeners are also invested in your work. I’m lucky I have the same thing. The podcast I do has a decent following, and a lot of those folks have checked out the movie.

Festivals were super helpful. You’re meeting filmmakers there. Winning awards at those festivals was nice because that gave us some leverage to promote. I think trying to make niche connections and find communities to promote your work is going to be a helpful way to get it out there.

Joanna: So you mentioned there, winning awards at festivals, like it’s just something that you just add to a checklist. So did you aim for that?

Did you do things specifically for specific awards? Then did you just enter them?

Or like what is the festival thing for film?

Jeffrey: The festival circuit. Well, I guess to rewind a little bit, this whole thing has been such a process of discovery. Going into the movie, we didn’t have any intentions of necessarily selling it.

I think Laura and I decided, we were willing to take a financial risk just on the opportunity to get this work up on its feet and give me the chance to direct in the same way that film school would do for probably far more money.

So really from the start, we thought like worst case scenario this will be 30k as a chance to get on set, get experience directing and have a feature film. Whether or not it sells, at least I’ll have a screener link that I can send it producers.

So everything else, the festival circuit, and the awards, and the sale, and the deal have all been gravy. In terms of festivals, I certainly was not aiming for any kind of award. All the awards that we’ve won have been like a really pleasant surprise.

Festivals are an interesting one because there’s kind of three tiers of film festivals. There’s the top tier, which are also markets, where films will actually get sold at those festivals.

So I know you’re international, but for Americans, it would be like Sundance, obviously, the Tribeca Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival and Telluride, maybe South by Southwest.

Those are kind of the only five sort of North American festivals where deals will actually be made. I think in Europe, it would be like Cannes, obviously, and then maybe Berlin and Venice. Besides those three, you’re not going to see a lot of film festivals where sales are actually happening at those festivals.

So then there’s another tier of festivals that are more like second tier film festivals. Those are really valuable for my type of movie where you don’t have any big names. You might be able to find independent agents there or other sort of low-level distributors that you can at least get meetings with.

Those are great way to meet people and generate some momentum and heat and press around your movie to kind of create a different sort of market than you would be at those top tier film festivals.

The general strategy is to apply to those top tier film festivals first. That’s kind of your lottery ticket, it’s unlikely, but you never know. The reason why you want to apply to those first and wait it out is because once you’ve debuted at a film festival, the likelihood of getting into another film festival becomes far less.

You know, because Sundance wants to be the festival to premiere your film. So you want to reserve your premiere status for the festival that you really want to premiere at. So you want to aim for those top tier festivals first.

Joanna: And the relationship building—

Were you going along to these festivals for years beforehand, seeing how it’s all done?

I feel like it’s quite similar to book awards or conventions. You need to know how things are done, you can’t just enter stuff into random things.

Jeffrey: You know, I think somewhat regretfully, I wasn’t really going to film festivals before this feature. I think had I been, I would have had a little bit more knowledge as to how to play the game.

I set a lot of meetings with filmmakers who had done this already in a very similar model and just grabbed coffee with them to sort of learn what advice they would give me.

I think it’s all about knowing your movie. This is I’m sure true for independent novelists as well, but it’s like, know what you’ve made, know your voice, and know your market.

Then look for film festivals that are catering to a similar sort of vibe and work within those parameters. Write a cover letter as you’re planning these festivals and give the festival programmers a reason to program you.

You know, if they’re getting 200,000 submissions, why would it be advantageous for them to program you, specifically?

Maybe you’re local and you know people that would come to the movie, maybe you look at other movies they programmed in the past and how your movie would slate well into their programs. So do the work for them and make it easier for them to program your film.

Joanna: I guess a lot of us in the indie author community, we use more algorithmic marketing around keywords and metadata, and we do paid ads and all of this. So did you consider any of that at all? Or—

Has it all been sort of human-based marketing?

Jeffrey: I mean, on my end, it’s mostly been like the human-to-human connection. I will say, even though we’re an independent film, we did sell to a distributor.

They have a marketing budget that they need to recoup before we start earning on the film, besides the upfront payment that we got for selling the movie to them.

So they have X amount of dollars that they’ve spent on marketing. I don’t exactly know where that money went. I have a meeting with them when we get our first quarterly and they’re going to talk through how they marketed the movie. I do think they may have done a targeted ad campaign on Facebook when we first were released on VOD.

I’d say most of the engagement and viewing we’ve gotten have been through word of mouth. We did get a great Rotten Tomatoes score when we first debuted which I think it’s been very helpful. There are a number of people who just look for positively reviewed indie films and use that as a chance to check out a movie.

I think we were released at a good time. We got kind of lucky because we released like right after both strikes resolved, so there was an opening for us. We weren’t competing with a ton of big studio movies when we first released.

Again, I don’t know. I mean, like it’ll be interesting to see when we get our first quarterly how we’re actually doing. So talk to me in two months, and I’ll either be thrilled or beating my head against the wall.

Joanna: Yes, it’s interesting. So you mentioned the strikes there. Of course, the Writers Guild of America went on strike, and then also the Actors Guild went on strike. As part of that, that was obviously in negotiations for lots and lots of things, but part of that was AI.

So we’re recording this at the beginning of 2024, and the text-to-video stuff is really starting to take off.

What are your thoughts on the use of AI in filmmaking?

Whether it’s screenwriting or any of the other things? What are your thoughts on using it as a creator, without going into the strike stuff?

Jeffrey: Sure. I think I would be similar to where the guild stands. There’s a writer I like a lot named John August who has a great screenwriting podcast, and he talks about AI a lot.

I don’t think we should just like flat out say AI is not a useful tool for creatives. I know a lot of showrunners who will type something dumb in AI just to get the room talking, or generate brainstorming ideas, to then let creative people actually fuel their own work and write their material.

I think what gets very dangerous is when we’re asking machines to be writing drafts of something. I think as a brainstorming tool or a research tool, it’s very valuable. I think when we start asking robots to start making art, I get a little scared.

It’s funny, I was talking to my brother-in-law about this, and he was like, “Why are we afraid of this? Like technology has been great for creatives. Look at the printing press. Everyone was so afraid when that came out, and it’s only been great.”

But the difference to me is that the printing press was a tool that helps work/art created by people get into the hands of more people. Something like the internet has been great to reach people and send your work out.

This is the first time in human history that we’re asking the question, should robots be the ones making the art rather than replicating or distributing the art? I feel very strongly that once we give over the sort of beautiful beacon of making and creativity over to machines, we’re in deep trouble.

Joanna: I say it’s a continuum.

If you have 1% to 100% computer-generated, everyone’s going to sit somewhere on that curve.

We all use lots of things online, in general, a lot of which is now powered by AI.

There’s a big difference between click a button and output a screenplay, to using it for like I just did earlier. “Here’s a picture of a door. Give me 10 ideas for what might happen when a theology professor steps through this door. Just give me some ideas around this for the story.”

Now, some of that was completely crazy, and some of it was interesting enough to spark other ideas for me. So I think there’s a creative spark in our creative process, in a human creative process, versus the mass output, which is not something either of us are advocating. [For my approach, see The AI-Assisted Artisan Author.]

Jeffrey: I totally agree. I think the other important thing is a lot of people will say like, “Well, you know, people won’t just settle for AI-generated art,” but I would slightly push back on that. I think they would, unfortunately. I think people’s tastes adapt to the work that’s being produced and made for them.

Without being specific, I do think there are movies and TV shows that, in essence, could be AI-generated that people really like because that’s sort of the cultural bar that people are setting for an audience. I do think it’s the job of creatives and producers to be the tastemakers that sort of fuel cultural conversation.

So I would like to be optimistic enough that people won’t settle for crap if AI is making it, but unfortunately, I’m not optimistic enough to believe that. I think if you look at people’s taste, it already has been lowered by the tastemakers of popular art today. So I don’t want to get too pretentious about this, but I do think people will settle for what’s made for them, and it’s our job to try to make good things.

Joanna: Yes, although I would also say I think there’s room for different things. So for example, in the AI audiobook narration space. I listen to a lot of audio, and I listen to it on like 1.5x – 1.7x. I listen to a lot of mostly nonfiction. Every human narrator sounds like a robot at 1.7 speed! It really doesn’t matter, I just want the information.

AI narration means that people can have audiobooks, audio content, in every language, every dialect, that we just can’t have otherwise.

I guess the other interesting thing would be McDonald’s versus a nice restaurant that you go to, and sometimes you need a McDonald’s, right?

Jeffrey: That’s true. That’s true. I would just love to believe, though, that like McDonald’s food, there is still an element of human thought behind it. There are executives at McDonald’s who are still invested in making something delicious with a human brain behind it.

I do agree. I mean, like, I love my guilty pleasure TV just as much as I love Succession.

Joanna: Yes, exactly. So it is interesting.

So that’s the screenwriting, but as a filmmaker, if you’re looking at your career decades ahead, I mean, it’s got to be like 100% likely you’re going to be using some kind of AI in your production. Whether it’s special effects, or whether it’s bit part actors, or music, or I don’t know.

How do you think other parts of AI could be used in the filmmaking process?

Jeffrey: It’s interesting. I will say the type of work I write and am interested in tends to be kind of very low concept, human driven stuff, at least right now. So it’s not like the material I write or my voice as a writer pushes towards like big, special effects type of set pieces.

I think you’re right. It’s hard because we’re taking, especially the guild’s, are taking all of this information and data like step by step. So it’s hard for me to answer that, but I want to be someone who is curious and open minded about it. I do think like the shutdown-the-conversation mentality is a little naive.

Joanna: Yes, I mean, obviously those strikes are now over, and they got a contract through. It allows the use of AI tools, but not to credit AI as a writer. So as in, they can use it in the ways that we’ve talked about around ideas.

I’ll tell you what I did use it for. I’ve tried Final Draft, and I find it really not intuitive as someone who doesn’t write in screenplays first. So I was writing out, kind of turning each scene into just plain texts, and then I would put it into ChatGPT and say, “Can you reformat this for screenplay format?“

Jeffrey: Oh, that’s fascinating. I’d love to try that.

Joanna: Then I would put that into Final Draft. So it just helped me with a bit of that. It’s like a technical thing that I don’t want to spend the time learning Final Draft. You know what I mean?

Jeffrey: As a tool, I understand it. It’s like, at a certain point, if you’re doing your own research versus an aggregator doing that research for you, what is the big difference? I think it’s just being thoughtful about how it’s being executed.

Again, the fundamental question in my opinion—

Is this a moment when art or creativity is being handed to a machine?

Like is what I consider the sacred act of creation, is that being handed over to a robot?

It’s so interesting to me, because I will say, Hollywood has a long history of telling stories about giving too much power to machines, and I can’t think of a single one where the climax of the movie is, “I’m so glad we all let the robots win here.”

Joanna: Well, I’ve got one for you, The Creator. Have you seen it yet?

Jeffrey: No, no. I’ve heard it’s an interesting one, but I have not seen it yet.

Joanna: It is excellent. It was so funny, because I was watching it, and it feels almost like a big budget American movie. Then at one point, I turned to my husband, and I was like, “I don’t think this is American, because of…” Well, I’m not going to spoil it for you, but I was watching it, and I was like, goodness me, this is not an American movie.

It is not. The producer, screenwriter, director, whatever he is, is British. So that was really interesting for me, because you mentioned there, like obviously the Hollywood big budget movies. Terminator, blah, blah, blah, but they’re all pretty much American. Whereas I think there are different views by different people.

The Creator is an excellent, excellent film. It’s like one of the best films that I’ve seen in ages, because it’s so nuanced and interesting around what the future of AI and robotics could be. So I’m just going to encourage you and other people to watch that.

Jeffrey: Okay, I’ll add it to my list right now. Maybe I’ll watch it tonight.

Joanna: Yes, although we said there’s so much to watch in the world. It’s definitely, in terms of the AI thing, it offers an alternative view.

So we’re almost out of time, but I did want to cast your mind forward. This is your debut micro-budget feature.

What are your plans? How does a career progress from there?

Jeffrey: It’s been really helpful for me to have made and sold a film. Obviously, like the big picture thing is that when I set meetings with producers or I’m talking to management, I have a tangible product that shows that I understand the mechanics of feature filmmaking in a way that, you know, the evidence can’t lie.

I did it, and I sold it, and it’s on Apple, and you can watch it now. There is an element of grit that comes with having done that that gives you a level of credibility when it comes to the next movie, and building your career, and being taken seriously as someone in the business.

Of course, there’s also the small stuff too. Like, when we sold the movie, we got a hit in Deadline, which is a major publication that talks about Hollywood news.

Then I had a couple folks reach out to me that were like, “Hey, I saw you in Deadline this week.” So it’s just like a tangible level up that has opened a lot of doors for me as I’m continuing to kind of set meetings and really pitch on the next one.

So it’s, again, I think in like the 90s, it would be selling your feature script as like the calling card for who you are as a writer. I do feel increasingly, now, it is self-producing your debut feature that serves as your calling card.

So I think just the credibility that comes with having done it, and now that it’s up on platforms and has been written about in the trades, it’s at least evidence that I’m not too much of a fraud, if that makes sense.

Joanna: Is your goal to work with bigger and bigger budgets, bigger and bigger casts?

Or do you want to stay making these smaller, more people-focused movies that you mentioned?

Jeffrey: You know, it’s funny. I have two things I’m kind of working on right now.

One of them is like a bigger budget, maybe like $20 to $30 million dollar kind of big dumb cruise ship comedy. The other one I’m working on is like similarly a small character and coming of age movie that I think could be made for far less.

So I think it’s smart for filmmakers to have multiple projects in their cooker that sort of serve different lanes or markets. I think most importantly, still really stay true to the voice and sort of essence of who that writer is.

It’s important as you’re taking meetings to be able to tell a cogent story about who you are as a writer and what kind of stuff you write, so that producers can understand how you would slot as they go to their bosses and pitch the idea of whatever you’re making.

Especially in Hollywood —

I think so much of finding your lane as a writer is about telling the story of who you are as a writer. That almost feels as important as your work.

If I’m thinking about someone whose career I really admire, I love Nicole Holofcener. She just came out with a movie this year with Julia Louis-Dreyfus called You Hurt My Feelings. I love The Land of Steady Habits.

She’s someone who writes and directs a lot of her own independent features that are really small, but she also writes on big studio movies to kind of come in and rewrite, or even if she’s not directing, she is also in the studio system. So I think she has a really interesting career. I would love to think that maybe I could get there one day too.

Joanna: Fantastic.

Tell us where people can find you, and also your film course that you mentioned, and of course, Always, Lola.

Jeffrey: Totally, yes. Thanks so much. To connect with me, the best place is probably just to head to Instagram. You can find me there at Jeffrey Crane Graham. Totally DM me there if you want to connect. I am happy to answer questions, and I love connecting with other micro-budget filmmakers. So if you have questions, totally come reach out to me there.

Then you can go to my website, which is JeffGrahamDigital.com. There’s contact information there as well.

That’s also where you’ll find my film course. It’s a five-part class all about micro-budget filmmaking, from writing all the way through sales, distribution, and finding an agent. I even have neutralized agreements and contracts that will serve as a great springboard for you as you jump into pre-production. So that’s on my website.

Joanna: Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for your time, Jeff. That was great.

Jeffrey: Oh, this was so much fun. I mentioned it, but I’m a big fan of your show, so I’m honored to be a part of it.

The post Writing And Producing A Micro-Budget Film With Jeffrey Crane Graham first appeared on The Creative Penn.

How can we focus on the joy of the writing process itself, rather than the outcome? How can we embrace the positive side of being jealous of the success of other writers? How can we deepen our writing with metaphor and sense of place? Co-authors of writing book, Millions of Suns, Sharon and Christine share their tips.

In the intro, Findaway Terms of Service; Why Kickstarter is the Most Creative Way to Launch Your Book [Self-Publishing Advice]; Sell direct resources; Why writing books is a career like no other [Roz Morris]; You are not what you used to be [Johnny B. Truant]; OpenAI’s text to video tool, Sora; Google’s Gemini model; the Vesuvius Challenge;

Plus, my updated Author Blueprint; Spear of Destiny; and Pilgrimage is an award finalist for the Selfies [BookBrunch];

This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors. 

Sharon Fagan McDermott is an award-winning poet, musician, and a teacher of literature. M. C. Benner Dixon is an-award winning author, freelance editor, and writing coach. Together, they are the co-authors of Millions of Suns: On Writing and Life.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

• Finding play and joy in the work of writing
• How to find joy when writing alone
• Using metaphor to elevate your writing
• Bringing place alive on the page
• Reframing jealousy in a positive way
• The benefits and struggles of co-writing

You can find Sharon at SharonFaganMcdermott.com and Christine at BennerDixon.com.

Transcript of Interview with Sharon Fagan McDermott and M.C. Benner Dixon

Joanna: Sharon Fagan McDermott is an award-winning poet, musician, and a teacher of literature. M. C. Benner Dixon is an-award winning author, freelance editor, and writing coach. Together, they are the co-authors of Millions of Suns: On Writing and Life, which we’re talking about today. So welcome to the show, Sharon and Christine.

Christine: Thank you so much. We’re so glad to be here.

Sharon: We are so glad to be here. Thank you, Jo.

Joanna: So we’re going to get straight into the book. You talk about the power, the play, the joy of writing.

It’s interesting because sometimes I feel like that play and that joy are lost in the discussions around publishing and the business of books, and this show is as guilty as any around that. So I wondered if we could start by talking about—

What are your tips for finding play and joy in the work of writing itself? Especially if authors feel that it is lost.

Christine: Yes, absolutely. So this is Christine. Sharon and I actually met and became friends under very stressful circumstances. We’re both upper school English teachers at the same school in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Teaching is one of those jobs, like publishing, that asks a lot of you.

There’s a lot of little details to keep track of. It’s emotionally intense. You’re facing months on end of relentless deadlines. Sound familiar? Many days, Sharon and I ended up side by side in our office, looking and feeling a bit like dish rags, just kind of like limp and dripping.

In those difficult moments, and this is part of why we became such good friends, we would play together. One of us would start a joke about like how we wished we were ambidextrous because then we could grade twice as fast. Then the other one would suggest like writing with our toes, and we’d consider a pen in the mouth.

We’d go on and on and laugh ourselves silly. We weren’t playing in those moments because we had lots of free time and light hearts, we were playing because we needed it. It was a way to name the absurdity of the situation and take a little bit of control back.

I think that’s very often the case with playfulness and joy. These things are a necessity, not a luxury.

The book was actually written in the early days of the pandemic. Both Sharon and I, for different health reasons, have to be very cautious about COVID, so we went into intense isolation.

The writing was a joy to us, it sustained us, but it was a deep, hard joy that we kind of had to mine out of ourselves.

Not because we were living the good life, but because we needed it to survive. I think joy is this kind of radical act of resistance, and play too.

You asked about the pressures of publishing, and I think that that fits right in here.

It can be incredibly hard to keep the joy and playfulness of writing front and center. Publishing takes time, it takes attention, it’s emotionally exhausting at times, and there’s periods when it can really take over your writing life.

I would say there are a couple of things to do to protect your joy in writing. One is to involve someone else, preferably someone who is committed to celebrating your work.

Having Sharon on the other side of the porch, reading her essay drafts to me, listening to mine, made it feel a lot more like play because we were tossing ideas back and forth. We were delighting in little turns of phrase and asking questions, being in it together. So I think finding someone who will play with you is really important.

The other one is to really put a value on your joy. It’s a harsh reality that time is finite. When you’re working on the business side of publishing, it does cut into your writing time, period.

Have some grace with yourself. Don’t beat yourself up if you didn’t hit your 1000 words a day, or whatever your goal is. Keep in mind that —

The joy that you have in your writing is perhaps the most important resource for your writing career. You have to nurture it, you have to prioritize it.

Even if it feels like you should be doing these other things, do the kinds and the parts of writing that you love. Not just because it’s good for your writing career, but it is. It’s also because it’s going to give you the tools to survive on the planet as a playful, joyful person.

If you want to talk in purely business terms, your writing career does depend on your willingness to keep writing. Feed the joy, and it will pay you back.

Sharon: I agree with Christine when she says pick the right person that you’re going to be working with. The two of us knew each other so well and knew each other’s sense of humor, and that sense of humor gets us through a lot of things.

I’m a poet, I usually write by myself. I’m not someone who can write out in coffee shops or other places with other people. I really need quiet and alone time to do that.

It’s a cliche, but it’s true, it can be very lonely to write sometimes, especially if you’re doing material that might be slightly darker or delving into things you haven’t delved into before. So this was a new occasion for me, working with Christine. The kind of joy that came from the spontaneity, that back and forth banter, knowing that somebody was on the other side of this.

I should say this, Jo, we made a pact with each other, we were not going to critique each other, which I know is unusual. We trusted each other’s writing process, we trusted each other’s skills. That’s why I asked Christine to do this project with me.

In so trusting, we felt like we could do our own revisions. We didn’t need to be each other’s editors. That wasn’t what we were there for. We were there to kind of inspire and support and uplift one another, and that’s exactly what happened. I don’t mean to sound pollyannaish, but it truly is what happened. It was probably my favorite writing experience of my life, to be honest with you.

Joanna: Well, that’s interesting. You mentioned that you do most of your creation alone, and that is going to be the reality for most people listening. So what are your thoughts on finding that hard joy, I guess, as Christine mentioned before?

How do we find the joy if we’re writing alone?

And we don’t have that person who we’re laughing with every day? How do you do it?

Sharon: I love that question, Jo. So sadly, I have just returned from a younger sister’s funeral, and that just was this past weekend. I know I will be writing about her, and I’m sure that doesn’t sound like anything that anybody would want to delve back into, going through grief and sorrow about losing someone you love.

For me—and this happened at a very young age, I think because I had an Irish grandfather who was always reciting poetry and was very playful about language. He would let me take a line, for instance, and let me kind of mimic it and then rhyme it, and he would laugh and support that kind of play with language. He didn’t treat it as precious stuff in that way.

I think writing alone and needing the silence, I’m still amusing myself on the one hand by the malleability of language, the flexibility of it, the play that I can do with my words.

Also, I think, and this is a little bit deeper, I don’t know if this is what you’re looking for, but I think —

When you hit something like grief and something that feels chaotic and uncontrollable, there is something quite beautiful about being able to order something on a page, even if it’s just words.

Words can’t bring the dead back, they can’t bring the loved one to your door again, but maybe I can take some of that grief that can feel so chaotic sometimes and make a pure order of it on the page while working in this medium that I love so much. I actually really love words, and I think that brings me comfort no matter what.

Joanna: I think that’s great. I love this phrase that Christine used, I guess, this ‘hard joy.’ Talking there about the difficulty in writing, and I’m so sorry about your sister, Sharon, I have two younger sisters. So I feel some empathy there.

Part of the reason we are writers is because it’s the way we figure out things in our lives and on the page and try and communicate them to other people. I feel like sometimes people think, oh, if it’s not coming easy then I’m a bad writer, or I’m not in some magic flow state.

But this is hard work, and I like this idea of finding pleasure in the work. Understanding that it is work, and yet this is what we love to do. I think that’s what I was trying to get to in that.

Christine: I would say, I believe that it’s a misunderstanding to say that play is easy.

If you ever watch children play, they work at it. Like watch a baby sitting on the ground with its blocks, and it is thinking, and it is working, and it is trying, and it is going through multiple iterations of “can I build this tower and knock it down?” and “how does gravity work?” and all of these things. They are working hard at play.

I don’t think that the best kinds of play are simple and easy. They are the things that take work. The reward is profound when we surrender ourselves to that hard work of play, and the hard work of joy as well.

Joanna: Fantastic. Now in the book, you have a great chapter on metaphor. In fact, we had one earlier, you talked about being wrung out like a dish rag at the school, teaching. So there’s a metaphor that people can picture in their heads.

How can we use metaphor effectively to elevate or deepen our writing?

But also avoid hammering people over the head with it? And also, I guess, be more original with our metaphors?

Sharon: So last night, the Grammy Awards were shown on the television, and everybody throws around the word star. That’s where I want to begin because, of course, that’s also a metaphor.

One of the things I love about it is that we don’t think a lot about what we mean when we say ‘star.’ When we say star, we just think of whatever the musician is that we might be complementing at that point, but really, we’re evoking the cosmos.

We’re evoking things that are above us and out of our grasp and out of reach. They’re distant and mysterious, and they’re sparkly and shiny, right? All of this is embedded in that metaphor, star.

The deeper you dig into the metaphor you choose to use, the more layers get peeled back.

I find that process very exciting, I kind of love that. It allows us to invoke things in a short amount of time, and in poetry, in particular, it becomes very important to be concise.

That economy of language has to say a lot in a little space. Metaphor is one thing that allows that. It’s a vehicle that allows that.

I think also a good metaphor can concretize something. It can make that elusiveness of emotional experience a little bit more specific to the human being, as opposed to a Hallmark card, kind of up in the ether and talking in generalities. So the metaphor can kind of put a pinpoint on it, I guess, is what I want to say.

You know, our language is used for tax documents, and wills, and grocery lists, and all kinds of things. Also, there’s something about metaphor, I think that when used well, can elevate the language.

I like that too. I do like that the language is taken a little bit out of the normal and the every day. I know that goes against some of what is being written now. I think a lot of people embrace conversational language and everyday language, and I applaud that, and a lot of people do it very well.

I still like a really good metaphor that can show you the reach and the breadth of our world. A glass may be a glass, but it might also be a shining star, right? I like that it can push our imagination into new places.

I would say it does need to be used sparingly. Too many metaphors start feeling overwrought. That’s where that whole word pretentious starts being tossed around, if people find that they’re running into metaphor and not enough straightforward language.

So I would say, a good metaphor comes in most handy when you’re trying to make ground at the ineffable. You want to really share with somebody, “I really was feeling this thing. Boy, it’s hard to talk about. I really don’t know how to articulate it. It’s kind of like…” and then you go into your simile or metaphor to give it a little bit more body.

Finally, we have a prompt in that chapter you talked about in Millions of Suns in the metaphor chapter, which honestly gives us the step-by-step way of generating metaphor. It’s based on almost sitting wherever you are — and noticing.

A metaphor can be literally anything. I can say, “Love is the dusty old guitar sitting in my room right now.” And then I say that that out loud and my mind goes, well, what does that mean? What does it mean that love is a dusty old guitar?

Then I take it from there. You know, guitars have bridges, and they have frets. Then I start pulling apart both the concrete item and the possibilities inherent in what I just said. That’s a form of play too. We were talking about play earlier, and I kind of love that moment of play.

That’s, I think, where I get a lot of fresher metaphors from are just my everyday world. I look very closely at a doorknob, or a keyhole, or a jacket, and you call it some kind of more generalized thing.

“Anger is a purple velvet jacket.” Well, what the heck does that mean? At first, it makes no sense to us, but if you really tweak and work with a good metaphor, you can mine a lot from the language in that way.

Joanna: I love those examples. I love the dusty old guitar.

Actually, it’s really interesting because as soon as you say dusty old guitar, then I get a sense of place, and I use sense of place a lot in my fiction and my memoir. I appreciated that you have a chapter on place.

How can we bring a place alive in a reader’s mind?

Why is that so important?

Christine: The how of place is really interesting. I’m going to touch back to something I talk about in my essay on imagery. The temptation as writers when we have invested in a place and it has knit its way into us, or it’s an imagined place and we have invested all of this meaning in that place, the temptation, because we have the language resources to do so and the imaginative resources to do so, is to describe it in exhaustive detail.

I have it so firmly in my mind that I can describe every nitty gritty piece and element of it for you. I could tell you about the dust on your shoes as you walk up the gravel driveway. I can give you the itch of sweat on your shins. I can give you the killed ears nest and the sound of the katydids in the hay field.

I could crawl over that place, the smells and the sensations, until my reader, if they’re patient enough, is standing exactly where I am. They feel everything I feel.

That’s the kicker. We are always at the mercy of our reader’s patience.

So if a detail isn’t doing something, if it doesn’t carry some spark of energy that’s going to kind of move forward in the prose, then it is our obligation as the curators of our own words to weed it out.

We have to say, okay, everything that is here that helps to build this place has to be doing something, even if we cherish it, even if we find it moving and evocative. Now, doing something doesn’t just mean plot.

Establishing a sense of place is emotional work, it’s atmospheric, and that can be important.

So setting a tone is work. It doesn’t just have to be, okay, someone’s going to use this leaf. therefore, I’m going to talk about the leaf. It can come from the connotations of specific words you’re using, you know, the difference between sweltering heat and golden sunshine.

But once you’ve hit that tone, then move on so that you don’t depend upon the patience of your reader to give every detail.

Also keep in mind that it doesn’t have to happen all at once. I do think that place can be unveiled rather like a character, in glimpses that the reader pieces together into the whole.

So I do think that there is the impulse to have it all, to say it all, to give it all because I have it. That needs to be balanced and tempered somewhat with restraint so that we have some discovery of the place, as well as our characters and themes, everything else we’re trying to put into our writing.

Joanna: That ‘everything else’ is often difficult because there’s always so much. Also, I guess, the character point of view for that.

Coming back to Sharon’s dusty old guitar, the point of view of the character who is noticing that and who uses that metaphor is going to change so much about the story.

As in, is it a grandchild discovering the dusty old guitar of the dead grandfather, for example? Or who else could it be? That will change the description of the setting. So Sharon—Do you have any other sort of bits to add on setting?

Sharon: Place is really important to me, just as a person. I like to be grounded. I like to know where I am.

I believe very much in something Ralph Waldo Emerson talked about a long time ago. He said, “Why are we always going everywhere at such a pace? Why don’t we just learn to know our own backyards?”

I wasn’t deliberately doing this, but I kind of live that way. I’m very interested in the local. As an environmentalist, I think that also is influencing me because if I care about the local, I actually have the power to do something about the local. So that’s more just on a personal level.

When I talk to my students about place, I kind of joke with them, and I say, look, in your lovely story, you keep saying “city, city, city,” but London is not Pittsburgh, is not Singapore, is not San Francisco.

These are very specific, different cities with different histories, different neighborhoods, different ways of being, and it matters.

It matters if you’re shaping a character on the page. You know, how are they being shaped by the place in which they live? So I do push my students a lot in terms of naming things.

Give me a street name once in a while, if it’s important to the story. I don’t mean you have to name every single street the character is on, but if it’s a key moment, yes, names matter. I think they make a difference. I think they ground the reader. I think that they make us feel like we are a part of the larger neighborhood that’s been described there.

It also, just in real life, makes us have a stake in what’s happening there. It’s hard to care as much, it doesn’t mean we don’t, but about things that happen a zillion miles away. I know the internet demands that we care about everything in every part of the world at all times, but I don’t think humans are wired to be able to do that.

I think we are wired to love a place and to love the people in that place. Yes, have compassion for others, of course, but place I think allows us to empower ourselves to do something. So I didn’t talk as much about writing there maybe as you would like, Jo, but I think place is just a very personal thing to me. It matters.

I said to my students once, you would care about naming place if you had been standing where I was above the Mississippi River once where there was a big sign right in the grass that I was in that said, “Beware of poisonous snakes.” Boy, did I care about place at that moment. I screamed, and I ran, and that was that.

But I said place actually makes a big difference in how we feel, who we are, and how we’re shaped.

Joanna: I really love that, and I agree with you.

Obviously, the character of the person who sees the snake sign and runs away is different to the person who sees the snake sign and kind of goes, “Oooh, snakes!” I’m that person, actually. I really love snakes. I wrote a whole book End of Days, which is all about a lot of different snakes.

So I want to come back to the book, because as well as the craft side, you also have chapters on more of the writing life.

Christine, you have a wonderful section on jealousy and ambition, which I feel is so often glossed over because we’re like, “Oh, I would never feel that because that’s just not me.” Like it’s not acceptable to necessarily talk about jealousy. So I really appreciated that.

Can you talk about the kinds of jealousy that authors inevitably face?

And perhaps how we can admit it, but also spin it in a positive way.

Christine: This was a hard essay for me to write. I don’t want people to know how petty I am, but I did write it and I sent it out. I included it in this book because, as you say, I think this is something we need to talk about. Just denying it or asking people to just stop it, that’s not the way to get through.

I’ve always been a competitive person, but I really don’t like how it feels. I get very judgmental about myself and about other people. It’s always easier and somewhat more in keeping with my Mennonite upbringing to put aside ambition. So if I don’t try to win, then there’s no shame if I don’t.

As a young adult, I really did, I tried to convince myself that my calling was only to teach literature, not to write it. So the fact that my poems and stories were locked away on read, that wouldn’t be a failure.

That worked for a little while. I had a few flirtations with publication, but I really didn’t allow myself to hope for anything more than that until 2019, when I quit my job as a classroom teacher.

I didn’t have a real plan that I am going to go become a writer. It just bubbled up, and I realized that when I did that self-reflection and asked, what do I really want to do next? Yes, I wanted to publish. I wanted to write things that other people would read.

That’s when the jealousy came in, hand in hand with my ambition.

The more I was getting into publishing, I could see other people succeeding and doing the thing that I wanted to do. So I was constantly comparing myself to others and not very generously, either to myself or to my fellow writers.

Now, of course, I can pull myself out of that mindset. It’s not like I can only feel jealousy. I genuinely love to see other writers succeed, but that’s not mutually exclusive.

I can feel jealousy and feel joy at watching other people succeed. I just have to acknowledge that the jealousy and the ambition are my little companions along for the ride.

As far as like how to take a more positive spin, I think that’s something that I’m still working out. I can say that receiving affirmation from my writing has helped.

I don’t just mean like success, right? Having Millions of Suns published, of course, was hard evidence that I wasn’t shut out of this path. Then when I got the news that my novel The Height of Land, which is coming out this fall, had won a contest that I had entered it in, I couldn’t stop shaking with the joy of it.

As important as those achievements were, the affirmation that really settled some of that jealousy in me was hearing from readers, from people who had read my writing and were moved by it. That’s what I needed, and that’s because that’s why I wanted to publish in the first place.

Building that little bridge out of my mind to other people’s and hearing that readers had actually been able to cross that bridge, settled something inside of me like nothing else did.

Maybe that’s the lesson, right? That we can be that voice of affirmation for one another. You can’t do that for yourself, but we can listen to each other, we can respond to each other, and prove to each other that the writing is working.

Joanna: So in terms of pulling oneself out of this—because I love that we’re all admitting it that we all feel this sometimes. But Sharon, it’s interesting. I mean, poetry, you’re a poet.

I feel like even though sometimes poets might not necessarily be the top of the charts, that poets might find jealousy is just as bad as a poet as in the sort of bestselling thriller charts or whatever. So how do you deal with this?

How can we pull ourselves out of jealousy to reframe it in a more positive way?

Sharon: Well, you’re absolutely right about that. Actually, I think when I was in graduate school as a poet, I was a little bit shocked to find out how jealous and how petty sometimes poets could be, including myself, when somebody else had a success that we were sort of longing for.

The success ranged, of course. When you’re in graduate school, the success might be that I got a few poems taken in a known journal, right? Then it could build from there.

I think a couple of things happened for me. One is that I had some really good mentors. They kind of just put things in perspective for me. They said, “Yes, it’s true. This person just got this award/publication that you wanted. But first of all, ask yourself, how hard are you working for it?”

The truth was, there were times in graduate school, because I was a single mom, I wasn’t able to put all that much energy into kind of trying to produce and to get published. Then there were other times I could.

So that was helpful just to kind of sit back with myself and say, you know, this person just got that, but they send things out every week. You’re not doing that. That was one thing that was a little bit helpful, just to give me a perspective.

I think the other thing was, and it took me a long time to realize this, but there’s a million voices in the world.

There are so many writers out there, and there are so many poets out there, and there seems somehow to be room for all of us.

If we do the work, and we show up, and we continue to put effort out toward getting ourselves published, I do believe that sooner or later something will happen.

Like Mary Oliver was the goddess poet here in America, and I adore her too, but am I going to reach Mary Oliver status? No. I know that I won’t, and I’m okay with that.

I think growing older also helps. I’m older than Christine, and I think growing older has tempered some of that for me. When I was in the university, teaching at the University of Pittsburgh, it was very competitive there, so you were picking up on some of that too.

The competition was really the more books you had, the more likely you would get a tenure track position, was the going saying. Well, it turned out, I didn’t want a tenure track position.

I suddenly thought —

Just keep moving forward. The work makes you happy.

You love to write, you’ve always loved to write. In fact, I experimented for a year not writing, and I was miserable. I thought maybe I could walk away from it, that it was just more than I could do, and I was miserable without it.

So I’d say ask yourself, am I doing the work? I think that’s just a nice practical thing to ask yourself.

Like this person I’m jealous of, have they been working that much harder at it? Putting more out there? That was helpful for me, just from my point of view.

Just, kind of for me, it’s always about the work. Christine said something about publishing Millions of Suns. I was so thrilled when that book came out, when it was accepted and it came out. We loved our book launch. We had a great old time, packed house, lovely response from people.

But, you know, at this point, my brain just wants to move forward. It’s not that I’m dropping Millions of Suns, I adore that book and I’m proud of it, but I love to write. So my mind is already like, okay, what’s the next project? What are we doing next? Where are we digging in next?

That is not to say I don’t still get jealous sometimes. I absolutely do. I just think the older I’ve gotten that that’s kind of dimmed a little bit for me. Now I’m more about using your time wisely and get the work done.

Joanna: I love that you said the work makes you happy because that is the point. This is what I focus on too.

I was laughing because I’m the same as you, I always just want to move onto the next project. I’m like, yes, that one’s done, let’s just keep writing.

I love creating new things in the world, and the thing that’s already out there is not the new thing, so let’s just move onto the next project and write. So it’s lovely that we can all find solace in the work as such.

So we talked a lot about what’s in the book, but of course, many people listening are considering co-writing. I’ve co-written a few books myself, and I found it very, very hard. So I wondered if you could maybe talk about, from each of your perspectives—

What are the benefits of co-writing, as well as the challenges?

Sharon: I’m going to use a word that isn’t very popular, but the reason that I asked Christine to work with me came purely out of my intuition. I have very strong intuition about certain things regarding my writing.

I was leading a creative writing workshop during COVID, and Christine was one of the members of it. There was about 10 of us. It was wonderful, it went on for a year and a half. It was on Zoom, of course, we weren’t meeting in person.

One night, I just had this very strong feeling to ask Christine to write a book with me. I had no idea what I was asking. I didn’t know what the book was or what we were going to write, I just wanted to do it.

I asked her after Zoom that night. She stayed after and I asked her, and she said an immediate yes. Then we went from there.

I think I mentioned this earlier in the broadcast that I just knew she was the right person to do it with. I have worked with brilliant writers. Terrance Hayes was one of my friends in graduate school. He’s a superstar poet now and has won all kinds of major awards, including the National Book Award, and I never would have thought to ask him to do it with me.

There are certain personalities that you love, and they spark you, and they inspire you, but they might not be the right ones to get down into the nitty gritty with. Christine, I knew that we could make it through challenges, hard times, good times, because we had a good sense of humor. We listened well to each other, we respected each other.

I really respect her as a writer, and I really respect her insight into writing. Also, we have different personalities. Christine is much more patient than I am. Christine is much more practical-minded than I am.

I’m sort of a romantic. I’m up in the ether sometimes, and Christine has a fabulous way of grounding me. I think those kinds of differences in our personality became very useful as time went on.

Christine: So when it came time for us to promote the book, it was so helpful to have the both of us because we have different connections, we have different opinions, we have different skill sets.

So, you know, on social media some of our audiences do have overlap because we live in the same city, we taught in the same school. So we talked together about like how we would roll out our announcements so that people who only knew one of us got all the necessary information, but if they knew both of us it wouldn’t become this totally redundant message that they hear 500 times a day.

That encouraged us to go really personal in how we talked about the book, which is appropriate for this book because it was really personal in its content. So we got to talk about what it meant for us to publish it, what it meant for us to appear in this place, or this newsletter, whatever.

We could really talk about what it meant to us, and I think that that brings people into that process with us and into the relationship between us as well.

Then we have our different strengths. My husband’s a filmmaker, and I’ve learned some editing skills working with him. So he filmed a conversation with the two of us, and I edited it into two promo videos that shared the anticipation of the release.

We promote the book on both of our websites. Sharon was able to talk to the school where she and I met and talk about teaching the book in the Upper School. It’s really just so helpful to have two people when you see each other as allies.

I think that’s the thing. Of course there’s moments of conflict, we had different approaches to how we wanted to negotiate the contract, but we put the relationship first because we knew that’s where the gold was. That’s what was kind of paying our way forward was that we knew we wanted to do this together. So that became the first priority.

Joanna: Well, the book is fantastic. It is Millions of Suns: On Writing and Life. So tell us—

Where can people find you and your books online?

Christine: So you can find Sharon at SharonFaganMcdermott.com. I’m at BennerDixon.com. You can sign up for email newsletters for upcoming releases and so forth. You can also look us up on Twitter. I’m on Bluesky and Instagram as well.

Millions of Suns can be found at book retailers like Bookshop and Amazon. If you want to get it straight from the University of Michigan Press website, it’s also orderable there, or request it at your library.

Joanna: Fantastic. Well, it’s been great to talk to you. Thank you so much for your time.

Christine: Thank you, Jo.

Sharon: Thank you, Jo.

The post The Hard Joy Of Writing With Sharon Fagan McDermott and M.C. Benner Dixon first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Hello, welcome to Everything You Need to Know About Backstory! I’m K.M. Weiland, and you are listening to the Helping Writers Become Authors podcast or watching it because this is also a video post.

This video is in answer to a question from SW, who asked:

“I’m interested in how you figure out how to chunk backstory and sprinkle it through the story.”

This is always a pertinent question, because wherever you have a story, obviously, you have backstory. Backstory, simply put, is whatever comes before the main story. Generally speaking, backstory is the history of the characters or maybe the story world. It could be whatever has happened in the protagonist’s life up to that point, or it could be multigenerational, going into very in-depth world-building and such in different types of stories, whether it’s fantasy or historical or something like that. In any type of story, backstory and how you treat will always be a consideration because it is a big deal. It’s very important and can, in a lot of ways, make or break how well the main part of your story comes across.

What Is Backstory?

So functionally, what is backstory and what is the point of it within a story?

Functionally, backstory exists primarily to create context for the main story by indicating something happened before the main events of the story. From it, we immediately get this sense of verisimilitude. It’s like the iceberg with 7/8th under the water, where there’s more than meets the eye. Even in stories where the backstory itself isn’t conveyed or isn’t shared with readers explicitly or otherwise, it still gives us this sense of a world that’s bigger than just whatever is being conveyed on the page. That can go a long way toward creating a sense of depth and nuance and intricacy within your story, which can be really important for pulling readers in.

In a lot of stories, the backstory will be very important to the main story and will need to be brought out and shared in some way that’s more than just incidental. This is usually the case in stories in which we want to get clear on what is motivating the characters in the main part of the story.

Backstory Creates Character Motivation

So, aside from just bringing in color and dimension, the primary purpose of backstory and why it’s important is that it allows us to create a sense of depth and cause and effect to a character’s motivation within the main part of the plot. Sometimes the reason for a character’s goal in the main part of the plot will be directly connected to a major backstory event. It couldn’t happen unless this backstory event happened first and then was brought in and explained in the story.

In other stories, the primary thing that kicks off the character’s goal and make them willing to pursue it throughout the main plot will be something that happens in the main story. But even in these instances, backstory can be important because it gives us a sense of who this person is and why they might react to the events in this story in such a way.

Why, for instance, is the detective so obsessed with catching this particular bad guy? We’ve seen this in many mysteries and thrillers where it’s not just because it’s his job; it’s because there’s something in his own backstory that mirrors this or is triggered by it. There’s a personal reason that makes the events of the plot personal, even if they really aren’t that personal (as they often aren’t, at least on the surface in detective stories because it’s just his job—he’s just doing his job). When we bring in the backstory, it allows us to explore the depth and the nuance of that motivation.

The Ghost in Your Character’s Backstory

The Anatomy of Story by John Truby (affiliate link)

One of the most useful terms for exploring the true depth and importance of backstory is the Ghost. This is a term that was originated by John Truby in his book The Anatomy of Story. You may often hear it used—or another word used similarly, and that is the Wound.

The Ghost is something that has happened in the character’s past that is deeply influential to the choices that are made in the main part of the story. The idea of the Ghost is that it’s something that haunts the character. It’s something that needs to be laid to rest, whether it’s directly influencing the events of the plot or, like in our detective example, it’s just something that is there for him or her. It’s something that is influencing and giving reason and purpose to why they’re willing to go to the extremes they’re going to go to in the main plot.

Creating Character Arcs (Amazon affiliate link)

The Ghost is important particularly when you are dealing with character arcs. In a character arc, the character begins with a limiting Lie They Believe, a perspective about the world that is limiting or dysfunctional in some way. In a Positive Change Arc, the character would arc out of that into a more functional Truth.

The Ghost is what creates the circumstances of that Lie. The character has to have a reason why they are so invested in such an ultimately destructive point of view. What made them think this way? The answer could be something very simple. Perhaps this was just how they were brought up, and they have had no reason to question their belief structure because it was reasonably functional up to this point. In that case, even though the Ghost is not horrific or traumatic, it’s still there in the backstory and explains why the character is the way they are in the beginning of the main story.

However, a lot of times, as the names suggest, the Ghost or Wound will be something a lot deeper with a lot more heft to it. It could be a very traumatic event that caused them, for example, to believe all people are bad or something like that, or that they’re not good enough, or that they don’t have the strength to do whatever is necessary to chase their dreams, or whatever is the Lie/Truth your character is trying to work with in your story that’s creating that inner conflict.

Primarily when you think of backstory and why it’s important, this is it: what is the Ghost in your character’s backstory? All the other backstory stuff—the stuff that doesn’t actually affect the main part of the plot—doesn’t matter. For example, generally speaking, it’s not going to matter where your character was born or what their birthday is or where they went to school. Even though all of that is a part of who they are and it’s their backstory, it’s not important to the main plot and therefore isn’t technically functional backstory within storyform as we think of it. So when you’re thinking about backstory and what to include, the first thing to think about is what’s your character’s Ghost? What is the catalyst in your character’s backstory that is kicking off the need for their character arc and the events of the external plot?

How Much Backstory Do You Need?

This is an important question. I think a lot of writers fall in love with their backstory. I can speak to this myself. I love writing backstory for my characters. I love that part of my outlining process where I get to dig deep into the character interviews and what I call the character sketches to find out everything about these people and about the world they live in. It’s so much fun, and there’s no pressure because there’s no need to create a plot out of it necessarily. You can explore all those things, like where they were born and what’s their birthday and who was their best friend in middle school and that kind of thing. And to you as the author, it’s fun, right? But most of that stuff is not going to be important to the story.

It’s very important for authors to get a sense of which pieces of the backstory are necessary to provide general verisimilitude and context that give the impression of this character as a dimensional real human being and what pieces are going to drive the plot. Pretty much anything else does not need to be in the story.

It’s very important to avoid self-indulgence when it comes to backstory. When it comes to backstory, the only things you’re going to include are those that actually matter to the plot, those that actually drive the plot. It’s just the same as when you’re thinking about why to include any part of a story or any extra character or any particular scene. The question is always: Does this affect the bottom line? If I pull this, will the story be impacted? Will the reader’s ability to understand the Climax be negatively affected? And if it’s not, then it probably doesn’t belong in the story. That’s just a good rule of thumb to keep in mind when it comes to backstory. Generally speaking, less is more.

3 Methods to Convey Backstory

There are several different techniques you can use to convey backstory. Last year, I did a three-part series about backstory techniques.

1. Sharing Backstory With the Backstory Drip

The main one is the one you’re going to want to use in pretty much any story, even if you do choose to use some of the other techniques. It is the most effective, the most invisible, and therefore the most useful of all backstory techniques. And that is the backstory drip.

Basically, you’re taking little bits and pieces of your backstory and slowly dripping it into the main narrative as the information becomes necessary or important for readers to be able to understand what’s going on. This technique is valuable because it doesn’t interrupt the main story. It allows you to create this seamless narrative of the main part of the story without boring readers with information dumps or with backstory that isn’t pertinent.

It’s very seamless, and usually how it’s introduced into the prose is via a sentence here or a paragraph there. It’s possible to do it in dialogue between characters, but it’s important that it’s not an “as you know, Bob” conversation in which two characters are sharing information they both already know. It needs to be a conversation that’s important to the plot and to the relationship between the characters and how that’s developing. It must actually move and change the plot as you go.

You can think of backstory as clues. It’s something you’re putting into the story because the readers need to know about it, but probably the characters do as well. It’s part of the discovery, and every little piece of the backstory that’s either discovered or that the character is able to see in a new light becomes a clue that changes the trajectory of their character arc and whatever they’re doing in the plot. We can see this in stories where the backstory is actually very important to the main story. It’s not just there in the background, but learning about it or recontextualizing it is really important to how the character moves through the main plot toward the plot goal.

Investigation stories are the most obvious example of this. For example, the movie State of Play with Russell Crowe and Ben Affleck is a good example. You have the main plot where there’s this murder investigation the journalist is doing and the politicians that are kind of involved in it in Washington DC. But the backstory is super important, and the backstory is just the relationship between Russell Crowe’s character and Ben Affleck’s character and Ben Affleck’s wife, who is played by Robin Wright. And this backstory becomes really important. It’s not that the characters don’t know about it, but as they slowly share it with us and as they slowly revisit it themselves and recontextualize it, it changes their understanding and their perception of themselves, of their relationships, and ultimately their ability to understand what’s going on in the investigation part of the main plot.

State of Play (2009), Universal Pictures.

In a story like this, you can see how important the backstory is, how crucial and integral it is, and also how important it is to sew it in bit by bit. If you just dumped it at the beginning or in a big scene, then you lose the ability to not just tease readers, but also to allow readers to experience that backstory along with the characters. It becomes a shared experience between the characters and the readers.

This is why the backstory drip is the single best way to convey backstory. You will use it in almost any story even if you use some of the other techniques. These other techniques I’m going to mention are equally valid and can be extremely helpful and useful. But they are a little bit gimmicky. So you have to be careful because they’re more in the reader’s face. Readers have to be really interested in the backstory to get these techniques to work because it requires more of an investment from them.

2. Sharing Backstory in a Prologue

The first of these techniques is the prologues. A prologue is basically an extra chapter at the beginning of the story that features extraneous information. Prologues, in general, are very tricky. Essentially, the prologue is your Hook. This is what has to pull readers into the story even though it’s not actually the first part of the structural narrative. It’s set apart, and if you don’t do a good enough job of hooking readers in, it can seem too separate from what follows and not a good hook. It’s not something that pulls them in.

Too often, particularly in years past, writers have been guilty of using this as a place to just info dump the backstory: here’s what happened, here’s the entire life story or the entire world history of the world I’ve built or whatever. That’s not a good hook. If you’re going to use a prologue for your backstory, you want to think of it as a tease. It’s a part of the drip, right?

Still, it needs to really hook readers. It should be so much explaining what’s going on as getting them to want to know more: Oh my gosh, this thing happened in the backstory and the character’s past, and I want to know why and I want to know what happens next because how does someone respond to that?!

From there, you can pull into the main story because they’re invested—they have a reason to want to know based on the backstory you’ve shared in the prologue.

3. Sharing Backstory in Flashbacks

Like prologues, flashbacks are also dramatized scenes of the backstory. Unlike prologues, they are interspersed throughout the main part of the narrative, and you might have one or you might have several. They can be as short as a few paragraphs, or they can be as long as a couple of chapters.

The great thing about flashbacks and the reason you might want to use them is because they show instead of tell. It allows readers to be right there, to viscerally experience whatever it is that happened in the character’s backstory without needing to be told about it.

The downside of this is that it chops up your narrative. It breaks up the flow of the main narrative so you can go back in time and share something. Particularly if readers aren’t as interested in the backstory as you want them to be, that’s going to be problematic. They might end up skipping the flashback or skimming it or just giving up on the story because, Oops, this is not what I wanted to be reading about. At the very best, flashbacks can create a disjointed feeling to the narrative. You have to be careful how you use flashbacks and how often you put in flashbacks and how long they are.

In last month’s video, we talked about multiple plot lines, of which alternating timelines can be one variation. This is basically where you’re expanding upon the flashback idea, but you’re telling the entire backstory as a second story in which you’re alternating the chapters throughout the entire book. This obviously would only be appropriate in stories where the backstory is huge, is equally dramatic and interesting as the main story and is extremely pertinent to the main timeline.

In stories like this (and really in any kind of story where you are alternating between POVs, plot lines, or timelines), I used to say, “You have to make sure each one is just as interesting to readers as the other one because otherwise they’re just going to skip and get back to it.” But what does that mean? What does it mean that “you have to make each one as interesting as the other”? Because a lot of times writers will say, “Well, the backstory is really exciting. All this incredibly dramatic stuff happens. There’s battles! It’s so exciting. Readers will love it!”

But that’s not necessarily true because the action in your backstory isn’t what makes it interesting. What makes it interesting to readers is emotional urgency. They need a reason to care about what’s happening to the point that they’re willing to read all the details and to spend a lot of time in these chapters or in these flashback scenes instead of just wanting to get back to the main part of the timeline and continue with that because they are invested in that.

Therefore, the key, if you’re going to do lengthy flashbacks or alternating timelines, is that you want to make sure there’s emotional urgency. Readers have to really want to know what happens in the backstory enough that they are willing to experience it. It must be just as important to them as whatever is happening in the main part of the story.

So when it’s done well, this approach can be fantastic. When it’s not done well, it can slow down your story and cause problems. It’s something to do to use with caution. Study how it’s done in stories that kept your attention and that you really enjoyed, so you can understand the difference between dumping backstory or sharing backstory that isn’t as interesting as the main story versus something that is really integral and interesting and is driving the emotional momentum of your story.

The Single Most Important Rule About Backstory

And all of that brings me to what I think is the single most important rule about backstory. This affects what kind of backstory you share in your story and when you share it. Now, it is a rule of thumb; it’s not going to apply universally. But it is a great little dictum to have in your head to ask yourself, “You know, do I want to put the backstory in here? Do I want to share this backstory?”

This number one rule for backstory is simply this: do not share backstory until you’ve reached a point in the story where it’s crucial for readers to know this backstory in order to be able to understand the main story.

This also includes any scenes in which it’s necessary for your characters to know the backstory or to remember the backstory or just to explain their actions via the backstory so the plot can move forward.

Again, this is not a hard and fast rule, but generally speaking, readers don’t care about your backstory until it becomes important to the main story. This is also a great way to help you build subtext within your story. If you’re just hinting at backstory (e.g., “something happened in the backstory, there was a Ghost, but I’m not gonna tell you what it is yet”), but it’s important and it’s driving the character’s reactions, that’s a way to pull readers along so that by the time you do get to where maybe you want to have a big reveal via a fully dramatized flashback, now you have emotional urgency. Now, readers will think, “Okay, I really want to know what happened in the character’s backstory, versus maybe sharing that flashback early on when I don’t care, I don’t have a reason to care yet about why this is so important.”

In sharing backstory too soon, you sap subtext out of the character’s actions and motivations because it’s all been explained—it’s all been laid out there. Now, obviously, you do need to lay it out there sometimes, and that’s the point of the rule. When the backstory becomes necessary, when it becomes pertinent, that’s when you want to share it. You also don’t want to compromise your story by not sharing backstory, and causing readers to think, “Well, this makes no sense. Why would the character act this way? What information am I missing that would have made sense of the explanation of the characters’ relationships with people who they had a past history with?”

To sum up, the importance of backstory is that it provides context. It provides a Ghost for your character’s arc. From that, it allows you to build this dimension and this depth into your main narrative. But it’s important not to overshare or to overvalue backstory. It’s important, but it should only be used carefully and subtly throughout the story to create an effect where readers are never pulled out of the main narrative, where it’s all one seamless whole, and everything that happens is building and adding to the emotional momentum of the story.

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! What do you think are the trickiest parts of sharing backstory? Tell me in the comments!

The post A Writer’s Comprehensive Guide to Backstory appeared first on Helping Writers Become Authors.