On November 18th, I hosted a webinar called "How Professional Screenwriters Create Great Characters", where I talked about how to come up with interesting and unique characters, as well as how tapping into your everyday life interactions with people can help with this. This episode addresses questions you asked in our Q&A session that we didn't have time to answer. There's lots of great info here, make sure you watch.

Show Notes

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Autogenerated Transcript

Michael Jamin:

And why are we rooting for him? We're rooting for this meek man who's going to die soon to make some money for his family, but also to feel like he's alive for the first time in his life because he's just lived this very meek existence. And so that's why we're rooting for him. That's why we like him. And when he makes mistakes, he may go off track, but we hope he comes back. We're still rooting for him. You are listening to What The Hell Is Michael Jamin talking about conversations in writing, art, and creativity. Today's episode is brought to you by my debut collection of True Stories, a paper orchestra available in print, ebook and audiobook to purchase and to support me on this podcast, please visit michael jamin.com/book and now on with the show. Hey everyone, it's Michael Jamin and you're listening to, what the Hell is Michael Jamin talking about? Well, today we're doing another q and a from II's free writing webinars, and there's a lot of questions that people had. We couldn't answer 'em all on the end. We ran out of time, and so we're going to address 'em here. But this episode, Phil, I'm here with Phil Hudson.

Phil Hudson:

What up, Phil?

Michael Jamin:

Today's episode is brought to you by a paper orchestra, which is my collection of personal essays. It's David Saris meets Neil Simon on sale on my website, michael jamin.com, or you can find it anywhere. Books are sold, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, apple Books, all those places. Go get it. Go check it out. It's a fun read. Yeah. Okay.

Phil Hudson:

Worth checking out all the versions though too. I was just listening to the audio book and we talked about this in your episode about the book itself, but the music cues and the intros, very well done. Very well produced. You're also telling me about, thank you, Phil, how hellacious of a process it was to do it

Michael Jamin:

To

Phil Hudson:

The quality you like.

Michael Jamin:

Yes. Because you only get to put it out once, but yeah. But thank you. So Phil got the audio book, but it's available ebook and print as well, however you consume your written materials. Love it. Alright, Phil, we got some questions. Enough about me. Let's ask me some questions.

Phil Hudson:

Yeah, let's talk to you some more about you. This is from the November 18th webinar. These are like you said, q and A stuff, and the topic of this webinar was how professional screenwriters create great characters. This was, I think, a first run on this topic. You hadn't done this topic before.

Michael Jamin:

It could be. Yeah, this was a good one. Yeah, this turned out to be a good one I thought.

Phil Hudson:

I think so too. We can tell, there's some metrics we can tell in terms of how long people stay, questions that are asked, how long it goes. And I was going to say too, we didn't get to these questions because typically when we first started doing this almost a year ago, February will be a year doing these. It was like 30 minutes of lesson and then it was a bunch of q and a and that has transitioned into about 45 minutes of lesson and then a little bit of q and a where we can get it. And then we even have VIPQ and A now where you can just pay a small fee to join for an hour after and you just talk to people on Zoom and they get to go live and ask you questions and some really, really good questions being asked in that. So if you're interested in attending these webinars, go to michael jamin.com/webinar where you can sign up for that. But then you can also sign up on that page to get into the VIP. If you want to ask Michael directly a question that you have if you

Michael Jamin:

Can't get to it. So to be clear, the webinars are always free, and if you want to spend extra time with me, that costs you something. But I should also say right now it seems like we have four that we're going to have a rotation, but we may keep adding different topics, but right now we have four good ones, so if you missed it, just sign up and maybe we'll do it again. Correct

Phil Hudson:

Me if I'm wrong, but I think some of the topics you've come up with have come from the q and a that you do on these topics. How do I overcome? Writer's block are like, I'm really struggling with a character or development. So they kind of incept the idea of like, okay, here's a topic we should go down. So lots of great value there. Alright, well again, just for housekeeping, we do split these up into topics. So we have kind of general topics. We have craft breaking in questions related to your course or the webinar topic and then miscellaneous. So we're going to start with K Craft. I think again, people want to know how to do the job, which I think is helpful.

Michael Jamin:

Yes.

Phil Hudson:

So Chad, Chad Siime or cme, I don't know how to pronounce that. Sorry, Chad,

Michael Jamin:

He doesn't, doesn't know either.

Phil Hudson:

He probably's probably making it up. Was it like Ari, one of the writers in Taco, they pronounced their name. It was changed at one point.

Michael Jamin:

Yeah, he says his own name wrong. Poor guy.

Phil Hudson:

I know someone who was a Heinrich and then when World War II happened, they changed it to Heinrich, Henrik Henrich because they didn't want to be associated.

Michael Jamin:

Yeah, yeah.

Phil Hudson:

There you go. Chad asked, do you have examples of writers who have successfully experimented with story structure? What principles did they stick to and where did they deviate?

Michael Jamin:

I don't really know. I mean, I don't really know if I have a good answer to that. Every time I watch something I go, oh, it falls into the good. I guess there's some really high level writing. Christopher Nolan. Okay. So I would say many of his movies do not fit what I would teach, like Memento, but Forget or Inception. I don't know how many times I've watched it and I still don't understand it. So it's a great movie though.

Phil Hudson:

Yeah. But I would say that I can see that clearly the writing structure in those.

Michael Jamin:

You can. Okay.

Phil Hudson:

Oh yeah, you're definitely an inception too. It's like how do we get on this journey and how are we making decisions and where this stakes, all that stuff. I think it's all,

Michael Jamin:

A lot of it playing at the timeline, memento when he's playing with it. I don't even know what year it's supposed to

Phil Hudson:

Be. You're right. But I wonder if that's, it's all there and it's just been split to change and mess with your head a bit, but it's all there, which is why it resonates with people.

Michael Jamin:

But I guess my advice is like, listen, if you want to operate at the high level, that's great, but let's just get to the professional level first before you become the master

Phil Hudson:

Level. And Christopher Nolan's a great example of that because he had made a feature before he did Memento, so he had a full feature. He was making short films all the time in film school before he even started experimenting with timelines and things like that. Yeah, okay. Listen to me just arguing. Michael jamin on his own podcast.

Michael Jamin:

What do I know? You might be

Phil Hudson:

Right, maybe my head did get big. Kevin and Steve. Alright, Marianne wants to know, you have such a great understanding of human nature. Was there something you've always been good at or did you develop it as a writer?

Michael Jamin:

No, I didn't. I have a very low emotion