DWR Award Screenwriting Finalist Elizabeth Weigandt
This week’s Writer Wednesday is screenplay writer, novelist and DWR Award screenwriting finalist Elizabeth Weigandt from Grosse Pointe FarmsI! Elizabeth is an author who loves action-adventure, fantasy and science fiction. She enjoys creating characters who make their dreams come true through ingenuity, grit and determination.
Her children's novel, “Queen Bee,” has received praise for its unique setting in the world of honeybees, dynamic characters and fast-paced storytelling. Elizabeth also has had a 20-year career in public relations and has written in a variety of forms and media, from journalism to creative nonfiction to fiction. She’s been published in Crain’s Detroit Business and other Detroit-based media outlets.
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What is your favorite part of the writing process?
My favorite part is when I complete a story. Once I hold the manuscript in my hand, incredible relief washes over me because now the story is a tangible thing I can edit and ultimately share. Whatever happens from this point forward, it exists.
Other than that, I am not romantic about the process because my experiences when writing a screenplay or a book look almost precisely like this diagram that describes The Journey of Creating Anything Great. In the beginning, it’s terrific, but in the end, it’s amazing. Everything in the middle is hard, hard work.
What does your writing workspace look like?
In a perfect world, my office is a place where I’m supposed to feel free and unencumbered, so I can generate ideas and work. The walls are sky blue, the carpet is white with silver stripes and the drapes are a gauzy white. The idea I had was to create a positive, far-seeing place in the clouds.
I try to keep my desk relatively uncluttered, but right now, there’s stuff all over it, which drives me up a wall. In a little while, I’ll try to clear it off so I can focus on providing entertaining answers to these questions.
Right now, I’ve got my favorite dance music by ODEZA coming through the speakers, and if my favorite song comes on, I might take a break and dance a little in the middle of the room to keep myself loose from sitting. I find it’s an excellent way to stay positive when I need a break or feel like my writing is going too slow or nowhere. I close the shades so I don’t scare the neighbors, and, after jumping around a bit, I always feel better about myself. When I sit down again, my mood is improved, and I can make a little more progress. Of course, when the words are really flowing, I don’t dance at all, and I switch the music to the sounds of rain or thunder to block out the occasional barking of my dogs or the TV downstairs.
I write mainly at night, so maybe getting a disco ball will complete the atmosphere. I say that for laugh, but now that I consider it, maybe it’s another great way to get me to lighten up and enjoy the process?
What’s your favorite part of screenwriting?
The best part of screenwriting is the overall feeling that I’m making a movie. I use Final Draft software, and as soon as I type my first slug line of the day, which calls out the location and time of day of the scene, I experience this thrill that what I’m writing could end up on the big screen. It’s so much more exciting for me than novel writing — and it’s more straightforward, in a way, because the focus is on the story itself and less on the exposition or thoughts and feelings of the characters.
I admire many novelists and their ability to illustrate images through beautiful prose, but it’s really not my style to focus on such things. I prefer to point my camera at the sunset, give you a few pithy words of description and let you see it for yourself. The idea of me spending a lot of time characterizing the sunset within the scene or how it relates to the characters always makes me uncomfortable, like I’m wasting your time. That’s not a dig on writers who excel in that area because many do. It’s more of an acknowledgment of my weaknesses.
Because I have a background in journalism, I find the screenplay format plays to my strengths of brevity and dialogue and my deep desire to be an entertainer with you as my audience. I love the incredible challenge of keeping you seated and totally engaged in my story for an hour and a half or two, and if I’m going to ask you to do that, I feel an obligation to make the utmost of your valuable time.
Also, screenwriting appears to me to be less self-conscious about itself, in the sense that it focuses less on art and meaning and more on storytelling, conflict and revealing character. Screenwriting strips away the pressure to be an amazing writer of words and focuses on one thing: maintaining your total attention for a relatively short period. I love that simplicity, even though screenwriting introduces many new challenges to achieving that mandate.
What is your favorite non-writing hobby?
It varies, but these days it’s exercise. Moving around helps me a lot, especially regarding writing, although, at this moment, I struggle to articulate why… I think it’s because I feel more positive, in general? Writing is really hard on many levels. I often think about what one of my idols, Stephen King, said in “On Writing” — that writing a book is like excavating a fossil with tiny brushes. It takes forever to reveal the giant T-Rex underground. Sometimes you find a bone, and you hope it’s connected to a larger part of the animal, but sometimes it’s a remnant, and that can be very frustrating. So, you dig in another spot, hoping to find something more. There are times when you wonder if there even is a T-Rex under here at all or if it’s just a tiny animal that will never be anything people will care about. And then you just have to suck it up and have faith that the T-Rex is there and accept that you must be patient in bringing it up for everyone else to enjoy someday.
This is mentally and emotionally exhausting work made more challenging because we do it alone for hours on end, on good days and bad days, week after month after year, with often so very little to show for it.
Wow, that sounds depressing. But is there any other way to live? I need to write, and I’ve come to accept it as a way of life now with its share of ups and downs.
So I do my exercises, get my heart pumping and that activity makes me feel strong, like I can do anything, so when I finally sit down at night to chisel away at a story, I’m doing it from a more energized state of mind.
What is your favorite piece of writing advice?
“I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.” – Elmore Leonard
This quote appeals to me because I dislike the idea that proper form trumps communication. I believe speech is a fluid thing that represents the human desire to connect by conveying ideas, and there really is no right or wrong way for it to do its job because every person and interaction is a kaleidoscope of variability. For example, we weren’t born with “Strunk & White’s Elements of Style” embedded in our brains. We speak and the result is language. Writing is our voices in text. Similarly, writing must also serve its fallible human masters, not ideals on how sentences should be structured or inflexible ideas on words' jobs. Language and writing are human and if you approach writing like math or engineering, you’ll lose your audience altogether. When I’m working on a story, I’m thinking about my characters and you, the audience, not whether I’m crafting prose my high school English teacher would approve of.
What writing projects are you currently working on?
I have two spec animated screenplays that I’m refining and preparing to submit next year. Beyond that, I have other projects in the works.
I don’t know if I’m alone in this, but I have a superstition about talking about anything I’m writing until the first draft is done. Once the story is out of me (or out of the ground, as it were), I can talk openly about it, but until that happens, it can’t be discussed in any detail. This rule exists because every time I’ve spoken at length about a work in process, the story has faded inside me. And I mean every single time. I don’t know why this is. Perhaps it’s because when a story isn’t finished, I don’t present it well to an outsider, so I lose certainty about the concept, characters or plot. Alternatively, I may be satisfying my urge to storytell when that urge needs to be directed each night at the page until the story is done? I sense it’s a bit of both.
Read more about Elizabeth and check out her work at elizabethweigandt.com. Follow her on Twitter at @WynterEM.