Harrison Ford, Diane Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Meryl Streep. What do these four thespians have in common? They've all acted to words set on the page by their muse, screenwriter
Aline Brosh McKenna.Fascinated by careers, as I covered press day for a new Paramount film about careers and your work family, Morning Glory, I sat down with the screenwriter to learn the back story of this film and writing.
For Aline Brosh McKenna, the process begins with an outline so she knows where she's headed towards. In this case, she wrote the first draft and then the script went through development for a while before it was shot (a result of the writer's strike). It sounds like no two projects are alike as the research differs as well. For instance, in The Devil Wears Prada, she adapted the screenplay from the original book so that presented its own project to remaining true to the original story. As Aline juggles multiple projects including writing Cinderella for Disney as well as an upcoming Sarah Jessica Parker flick, her advice is that writers write.
Just do it.
"If you want to write, you should write and that's what you should do. I always talk about it as black marks on white paper. The most important thing to do is to get up every day and put black marks on white paper. It's so much easier and more entertaining to talk about writing and to plan to write and to complain about writing than it is to actually write."
She continues, "It's pretty excruciating work and whenever anybody has issues with their writing career, I ask, "How much are you writing?" The good news about it is that it's highly highly subject to practice. The more you do it, the better at it you will get. I think it's just really a job about a lot of perseverance."
Dorothy Parker: "I enjoy having written."
As Brosh McKenna quoted Dorothy Parker, it was intriguing to see how this working mom juggles numerous projects in different stages of production. "I think it's much harder when you're starting out and you're doing it because you want to establish your career," she says. "It's my job, I have to do it, I have to get it done. So, some way, some how it has to get onto a piece of paper."
Her overall advice is to set concrete goals which can really be applied to any craft when you think about it. "I think that's the most important thing whether it's three pages a day or five pages a day, to have a goal for a day."
