Adventures in Screenwriting

Honest, raw and very funny, this book will take you on an emotional joyride through a screenwriter's creative processes, her pitfalls and breakthroughs, where the boundaries between art and life are blurred.

Screenwriter, script consultant and festival programmer Selin Sevinç's musings on the elusive art of screenwriting reveal the psychological landscape of her writing process. Her darkly amusing tales of homelife and motherhood in the US and her own childhood growing up in Turkey seep into the narrative, as she battles with her writing demons.

Sevinç demonstrates a deep technical knowledge of the craft as she guides you through the writing journey from nurturing story ideas to putting words on the page, with the ultimate goal of breaking into the film industry. Her personal reflections, frustrations and inspirations illuminate the unique and charming perspective of one stubborn writer.

Excerpts:

--You must read a screenplay but see a film in your mind's eye. It's meant to distract you from its current form in words to prompt you to conceive of its future form in film; its current form is destined to be redundant. In other words, a screenplay is a pre-ghost of what it yearns to become, on which its existence-and value-depends.

--Screenwriting, in its purest form, is an art of implying real life in the deceptive cloak of a fascinating and exciting version of it. It's dream-selling even if your dream is not quite being a serial killer, or a war hero, or a desperate housewife with a closet full of secrets. It's giving the audience an opportunity to not be themselves. It's lies, but such truthful and life-like lies that it tells you more about life than life itself does.

--Writing really is an exercise in studying the heck out of something and then forgetting all of what we've learned. Working really hard and then letting go of all that work and becoming blank and trusting and allowing.

--In the end, the skeleton of my story will probably look similar to all the others, in the same way that most humans have the same number and configuration of bones in their body. But, if I've done my research, I know my characters well, I have come up with fascinating conflicts, motivations and turns of events for their journey, then my story will stand out from every other story out there, in the same way that every human stands completely apart from every other human despite how similarly they are constructed.