Voices in the Room

When I took Screenwriting, Eric Shaw told us stories about some of the writer’s rooms he had been in. I imaged a room similar to a CC classroom: an oval-shaped table, plenty of… semi-comfortable chairs, a whiteboard, and perhaps a projector or TV. I also imagined that the air would smell like cigarette smoke, that ideas would be written on multicolored paper, and that there would be a group of intelligent writers from different backgrounds, all of whom with very little idea what to think up next. While I was wrong about the cigarette smoke, everything else about this description that appeared in my imagination several months ago was exactly what we got to see today. I saw a group of adults thrown into a room with an unlimited amount of sticky notes, forced to put their creative imaginations to work. It would be like telling a group of 4-year-olds to figure out how to ride a bike on their own and rewarding them with candy. However, this particular writer’s room had something special about it.  Something I couldn’t have predicted–and I’m not sure if this is commonplace for all writing rooms–was that this grouping of  writers would nearly cover the entire human age spectrum. Unlike the group of 4-year-olds, who would be destined to fail miserably,  these were men and women from age 25 to 65, all in the same room and working on the same project. This is a really cool idea, and it was definitely an amazing experience to be able to see these men and women at work and even share some of our own ideas with them.

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