Reading Program

What most people correctly assume is that there is a lot of writing to do in the Creative Writing program. What many don’t know is that there’s a ton of reading to do too. Since all classes are workshop classes, there can be a lot of reading to do for classes, especially if you’re taking longer-form genre classes. Like what I somehow got myself into this year.

Last year, I was taking lyrics, poetry, and creative non-fiction. Lyrics and poetry were pretty one-pagers. Not much time to spend reading.

This semester, I’m taking stageplay (where we’re now reading 20-page one-act plays), TV pilot (where we’re workshopping four to five pilot/specs a class, but we’ve just finished doing outlines and now heading to scripts, which will be around 30-60 pages each), and creative non-fiction (where even the shortest submission is four to five pages). It’s my fault for signing up for these classes, but I guess I didn’t factor in just how much time I’d spend reading and giving feedback. I’m pretty sure others don’t spend as much time as me as evidenced by a short paragraph of feedback I get, but I really value feedback so I can spend quite a bit of time just writing good notes. It’s not really fair, but what’re you gonna do.

At least I had the privilege of handing in a 4,000-word personal essay for workshop last week… which, now that I think about it, I’m not sure if people will have actually read for tomorrow. Ugh.

TV Pilot

So I`ve written about half a page of my TV pilot, and I just took a moment to absorb it.  It sounds really stupid, I know, but a sense of accomplishment, satisfaction, and above all, awe, fell on me when I saved my file as “The Gays — Pilot”.  It`s not like this is an actual show, and yet I feel so close to it as if it is real.  Well, it`s real in my head because I know exactly who these characters are and what they`re going to be doing, but at the same time, to be putting these words and ideas that I`ve been developing for months now, makes it feel that much realer.

I feel like an amateur when I`m feeling emotional at writing my first TV pilot, but I can`t help it.  Please someone pick up my show.  Thank you.

From outline to pilot

Got the go-ahead to proceed from beat sheet outline of my original TV pilot to draft.

I am excited.  Finally.

The scary thing is that now I actually believe my show could be on the air somewhere, sometime.  It’s a weird feeling.  I think I should get used to it because, quite frankly, my show is pretty awesome.