The Entire Education Is Theater "For Writers"...!

Hello all creatives and social networkers around the world. Today’s title implies a very important discussion, hence I will take care of presenting it so, as well! Today I will try to pose the educational, experiential as well as artistic sides of getting into the minds of characters, walking in our characters’ shoes and find out what makes them believable for writers, as well as general tips of … what actually works (you have a first taste by the title 😉)

I have been taking very analytical lessons by ScreenCraft, an organization located in Beverly Hills, California, on developing dramatic movie ideas. So, this is where the origin of the wonder “getting into the minds of characters” actually began. Did they bite the forbidden fruit? No. Did they say something they shouldn’t have said, heard something they shouldn’t have heard, did something they shouldn’t have done? It depends on the viewing angle…!

 

Those of us who have seen La La Land, would probably give everything to feel and live like its main protagonists, Sebastian & Mia, even if it deals about the joy and pain of pursuing your dreams. Today’s discussion is about the analytics all around it, not just the film but the experience of any of it. You may have seen High School Musical, or Step Up 2 The Streets, or Good Will Hunting, or Dead Poets Society or many more films independent from the genre and now many of us are writers. When we create an experience with scenes and narrative action, we ideally need first-hand experience about those scenes and actions. Ideally, we should reveal as much information as possible in our scene headings that play an organic part in the entire screenplay, it’s how we set up a story dealing basically with personal, indirect (relevant) or in our best of options, educational experiences, this actually means first-hand knowledge. Let’s find out where this leads before we draw our first conclusion. Many of us when we eventually have to explain the conflicts of character development and actually develop characters with scenes and structures, we come up with topics, ideas and analyses that we have to experience them to make them believable, how could we possibly know how the character acts and behaves? 

 

For example, in the first draft of my 3rd book that needs plenty of work, I talk about a ballerine. A ballerine by whom I feel attracted, so if I’d like to describe how she communicates, behaves and acts with her dancing students I would have to come up with relevant descriptions… Perhaps someone else would like to describe the acrobatics of Cirque Du Soleil, or if it's a musical or a film with dancers, it’s the setting of a “screenwriting story” that determines what’s necessary and what’s not. For example, the screenwriter in La La Land is not expected to come up with lyrics, he talks about music numbers but someone else will come up with writing music. Eventually though, the writer has to deal with the method, the research, the atmosphere, the imagination and the acting of the script. As well as beginners say, we have to be familiar with the material…

1.) What would my character do in this situation?

2.) What would hurt my character most?

3.) How would my character react to this conflict?

4.) How would my character shine in this situation?

 

That’s The Magical If  😉

 

Conclusions rise from the fact that to develop characters effectively we must deepen in their psychology, we must deepen in their worlds and their routines, we must deepen in their dreams and nightmares and wonders, we must deepen in their habits and tastes and we do not have such an expertise. All the above define the limits of where writing what we don’t know of stops, and we have to come up with writing on what we feel familiar with. This will give us a sense of our repertorie, but again, to make quantum leaps we need to work with concrete paradigms. 

 

In the competitive world of USA actors in America, the big names that are professionals are not mere professional actors but professional celebrities. Projects and writers have bombarded us with Hollywood’s next flair of the week relevant with an artist’s journey, musicals, melodramas, etc but like writers, both actors and writers have to get along with agents, have to market themselves, have to do public relations, have to give interviews, have to work with publishers and the internet and these movies describe the overall feeling and excitement of growing up as an artist… If we’d like to portray hunting fame in a screenplay and put an actor socialize, are we aware of public relations? Do we get the overall atmospheres of festivals and journalists surrounding them? Eventually we will come up with scenes and subtractive logic in a screenplay, but “can we”, though? If we possess the experience, it’s fine. If we don’t possess the experience, we should seek something relevant (indirect) that we possess. We should definitely count on reading books, watching movies, talking with people and the ideal is that we could be educated on these things. If La La Land deals with Mia becoming an actress, what’s the dimensionality of being an actor?

 

In ancient Greece the paths of knowledge had been parallelized with drama. The entire education was a theater according to ancient Greece. This took place for no matter what happens with our educational lives, our professional identities and our expertise, when we have to portray characters doing all the previous we eventually have to come up with our most fundamental conclusion for today that “right education” means “right theatre”…! For example, those of you that will take a look at my profile:

 

A.) Communication

B.) Conflict Management

C.) Emotional Intelligence

D.) Public Relations

E.) Marketing

F.) Writing – Screenwriting

G.) Psychology Elements

H.) Logic

I.) Career & Strategy

J.) Scaling Up

K.) Fantasy

L.) Being an entrepreneur of one’s self

 

All the previous dimensions have been part of my educational profile and are also part of an actor’s life as well…! In The Words of Emily Logan, Joel & Emily begin as student actors in high-shool and later on Joel will deal with professional drama and Emily with English literature. Developing a screenplay requires a packet of things. Do my characters portray that packet? If I’d like them to deal with personal development, it’s very easy to theorize but eventually, how can our previous dimensions help us in terms of building up their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in their profiles? Better visualization at the end of the day for the actors, means better visualization of my profile, direct or indirect.

 

Of course, if someone writes action, or thriller or sci-fi, it’s both an actor’s educational dimensions (he will have to sell it to actors eventually) as well as education relevant with helping the genre of the script deal with the important things of its subject matter and make the script shine. Can we? Personally speaking, attending not just introductory classes on screenwriting, but the analytical art presented by ScreenCraft, made me realize my education is the other side (the real one) of an actor’s life, as a writer and by being both me and the actor who we truly are! Actors need a very strong inner life to counterbalance their fantasy life and quite often, this means being well-searched on the above fields…

 

Realizing that right education means right theater, we realize that the building blocks of a writer’s art and creative profile are the building blocks of his/her artistic materials. Someone who is keen on history will develop historical novels. Someone who likes science will engage in science fiction 😉 Someone else will produce courtroom drama because he has experience with law and justice, like in A Few Good Men, or A Time To Kill or Erin Brockovich. To come up with material we have to put ourselves in our characters shoes and find out ourselves, how the heck are we going to put them in believable situations that seem real. If someone wants to get to know a character really well, it’s the writer’s subjects and expertise that need becoming aware of it, building it as well as refining it… Have you felt that in your interactions and feedback? Quite often, it’s about people we assume to know, but we do not quite know really well after all… Have a great time folks!

One Size Doesn't Fit All: The Creative Mindset!

The Disruptors - Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon

Dear folks, there's been a long journey of over a decade to come up with a version of materials, creative projects and social networks so I believe now it's time to think I am at a crossroads of where to go with my creativity. Before that happens I would like to talk today about the entire pack of book publishing, digital marketing and meteoric technology know hows. If we were freshmen in the university or if we had to give advice to our younger versions of self and this little guy got to know of memoirs dealing with Amazon, social networks, Apple approved aggregators with books, plenty of academic testimonials and creativity driven from the top, this guy would feel the king of the world... Reality is much more different but much more promising as well as it's true that at that ages we may lack analytical thinking on the issues above, moreover, quantifying our decision making. 

 

Getting started with my own paradigm, book launch in Amazon is enough for the company to copy the file and distribute it all around the world where the company has sites and offices and that's the first exposure of the writer towards global understanding. Nevertheless there are dozens of people and networks involved to bring a project to life. The writer, the writing consultants: story consultant and proofreader, the intellectual property offices, the graphic designers to master the digital files' approval, UK and USA digital distribution companies, networks to get a beautiful book cover that will be fine with your psychology, ISBNs from The National Library of Greece, "find" all the above networks in terms of affordable costs or being free, markets' approvals at the end, do you believe I am complete with the above? Not even the double of it! Planning a book launch, comes with planning your web presence including an entire pack of digital marketing activities. 

 

Thinking of a writer's web page, thinking of a Facebook page, thinking of Facebook banners, thinking of engines that shorten URLs, thinking of photos and campaign materials, thinking of podcasts, if you think of podcasts then you come up with free text to speech software, then comes sound recording, so, what's next? Afterwards you could possibly seek author interviews and getting familiar with digital PR that some of them come up with larger networks promoting your work. Advice with Twitter followers and, if you're lucky enough getting book reviews. Nevertheless, book reviews are not the singular reason that the entire success of your book pass through as it's important to consider what sort of validation you ask. A novel? A screenplay? An essay? Poetry? So, who's responsible for the previous? Quite often, book reviews from the crowd are being considered far from industry validation such as a publishing house approval, movie approval or foreign rights...! It just helps with sales...

 

Now, in terms of the validation mentioned, are the issues presented above the single dimension of where your creative success and fulfillment depend on? If someone writes a screenplay, you have to consider script coverage (meaning, professional evaluation) from accredited artistic organizations and get to know things beforehand and afterwards related with the movie industry. Reading books, getting to know the ecosystem of cinema, experimenting at your blog. If you're writing philosophy or if your book is thematic and it's not literature then this is a field of subject matter experts. What the heck are you writing in the end?  OK you wrote it and it's ready to get published. If you have deep pockets you may consider book events but I believe this goes hand in hand with what kind of validation you seek, as stated above. Are you truly familiar with how the above activities work, or do you believe you will get stuck at somewhere, proving that in the 21st century educational backup is more than necessary? And how far are you willing to go in terms of writing your memoir by acknowledging that what's most important is an alignment with "management", "experience" and "company profiles"?

 

Now let's get deeper to tougher considerations. When it comes to the campaigns described, perhaps setting up Google My Business, the hunt to come up with an article 24 hours per day and much much more personal work as it is described above, that perhaps you knew nothing, not even a hint of it 2 years ago and you have to discover everything through specialized Google queries, how much time and effort are you willing to invest? Are you willing to align your creative life with the rest of your life? And if so, are there problems being confronted? Have you truly acknowledged that the 4 industry disruptors of the 21st century that is Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook make it clear cut that not even the half of us know where something truly begins and where it truly ends? What about technology upheavals and AI? Familiar with the science of how big data and what actually sells in the internet work? Interested to go the extra mile and get solid foundations with science if the starving artist syndrome is not your type and you're truly interested in career building? A case for all of us or some?

 

OK then, you say, I'm starting to get the big picture so this means I have a solid understanding of what my options are, what market research says and how I will proceed with my opportunities and decision making. But having to consider a balance between work life and personal life, where books may be something completely extra, considering that success is also making money, your first concern deals with career management. Are all of us doing the same, or familiar technological jobs? So if not, is the above a work worth doing? How fast and for how long? Remember, these mean nothing yet! John's Revelation fastly approaches! Never ever engage in activities or the internet without a strategy. If you think that with your first or your second book you're gonna make a living, forget it. Willing to adapt a book into a screenplay? Have you found this one, unique, diamond company that makes it with the lowest cost possible? 

 

Are you willing to invest in quantity and not just quality to make it happen? But when? How fast are you willing to work? Since you're not getting paid, are you aware that slowness is not an advantage? Familiar with what global presence truly means and how to deal with foreign companies in general? Aware that this may mean hundreds of emails with the companies, your consultants and your options to get to know how things work, or even worse, get to know things you're not aware of including reading dozens of articles in the internet related with the industry? Do you consider yourself a perfect user of PCs and the internet? How good are you with the ecosystem of websites if creative concerns or problems arise? Where does art start or end and where does the business side of things continue? And so far, you may be familiar with nothing in terms of opening accounting books in the future to support your work legally and safely. Isn't this an ambitious, bold and extremely risky step that you shall not consider away from an employee - boss relationship? How does your character correlate with that? When making money with your art then you come up to the conclusion that money, dates and time matter more than usual. And what if you can't focus to complete many projects in the long term or if focus and writing a lot seems difficult?

 

So far you must be perfectly aware of that success and effectiveness as a writer started for you as mere inspirations and joy of writing paragraphs and discussing your art in the internet, but it continued with confronting completely different, complex and fuzzy issues that do not care about what a business card of yours writes. You come up with other concerns and other professions. There are a lot of people in history who decided they are creators and not economists. They are artists and not technocrats, publishers or business people. Some of them failed, were deceived and some of them still have nothing to do with the dynamic profile of this article. For them it's simply that the internet or digital marketing is not an issue, not dare to mention about science and AI, they're just others. OK, now we're getting closer to the truth and solid arguments but when it comes to the internet there is a quote: Think Global, Act Local. Don't you think the term "international" is quite heavy? And what exactly does it mean to go beyond borders? Willing to discover that to succeed it means you will find yourself investing in a decade of creativity as no writer solves his problems with his first book? Proficient in the English language and moreover, with professional standards?

 

Personally speaking, I have found myself in the middle of dozens of theorizations, analyses, book readings and book evaluations, but more importantly I have found myself analyzing, deciding and generating arguments in a sense that ordinary people CAN'T. Conclusively, now we realize that to innovate, create and pioneer in book publishing and the internet in the 21st century involves dozens of non-linear activities if compared with mere art. So that's the exact reality of what it means to survive in the world of the 4 disruptors, these are Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook. In a world where money doesn't bring happiness but it surely helps to get things done in the long term. Have a great time folks!

The Importance Of A Filmmaking Studio Mindset

Hello folks, today I will explain through my own paradigm how everyone’s thought laboratory (for each concerned case) can affect us deeply in the way we act or write. One of the very precious comments of one of my professors back then in Jacob Krueger Studio was how to be present in the moment. As a first view you may say this is the case to improve in terms of lack of focus. After all, discussions and likes both in the internet and outside is a way of declaring present… I am not interested in such presents… So let me use my creativity and writing to explain all about my next steps and how to make the most out of them, present. Creative rights from a production company include the publishing a book option, a book of the final draft, not now. First of all, can the audience of a new writer be compared with the audience and leverages of a good entertainment studio? Secondly, web leverages from a studio can tremendously help books’ profitability. I am always talking about the missing keys right now to fit Amazon’s algorithm of sales…! To the point, there can’t be more proofs right now of scaling up if there’s not a screenplay sale to an entertainment studio. But let’s just view things analytically. Based on the above I would like to explain what they mean if compared with what I said in the beginning, my thought laboratory.

Having studied and talked numerous times on digital marketing, creativity and AI, a magical world of power emerges in front of us, with plenty of perspective, plenty of future potential and plenty of promises for a curriculum vitae. So, today’s point is how exactly all the above are stuck back, frozen and sub-functioning because the creator may have a peculiar relationship with loyalty, promises and the need to make a few heads happy. I am talking about proving creative success by accepting a hypothesis exogenously defined…! This is the case for science as well, there can’t be a theory founded if we don’t accept such a hypothesis, Einstein used the speed of light for this… All of the above concepts related with web marketing and digital perspectives can be ‘simply measured’ and in order to work for newly-born writers – this doesn’t include writers who may have thousands of followers or members somewhere and can leverage social decisions – there have to be extra steps taken. For me, since I have focused not just in self-publishing but in the art of a screenplay is to focus on getting my work ready for the cinema. Fees, leverages and the production company’s audience including colleagues can play a big part in getting things done, in other words, to talk about success and results. After all, aren’t all the above issues of accurate self-evaluation, self-consciousness and self-awareness if it is to remember Goleman’s model of Emotional Intelligence in the workplace?

For everyone of us, being responsible and the sole delegate who determines our own performance is a must in the complex 21st century. If we don’t decide to step away from the conflict, to avoid it in other words, but instead of it, face it, we can all come out a lot stronger. For me, working with the best office in Hollywood can play an integral role in finding creative success. Have a great time folks!