The Event: An old man is on the subway, where he was sitting next to a woman (she was on his left). The woman got up right before her stop and said “Excuse me” to the man since his legs were in the way. The man moved his legs a bit, thinking it was enough but the woman still couldn’t pass through. The man suddenly got quite angry and started mumbling as he further moved his legs to make room for the woman. As he mumbled angrily, he was giving this woman a killer death stare.

Okay. So when I saw this happen, I immediately thought that this old man was being a jerk. To me, the woman really didn’t have much space to move around if she needed to reach the doors. She could’ve been rude and walked through the old man’s legs, which probably would’ve pissed him off, too. I initially thought that this man was being lazy and inconsiderate, but then I started thinking: why did that woman bother him so much. And this is when I started thinking about potential plot lines….

The Story Ideas:

• Before he got on the subway, a 50-year old man got into the worst fight with his wife of 40 years. She declined treatment for her cancer and he can’t change her mind. He was taking the subway to visit his son, who had cut off ties with his mother since he was 18. This old man thinks reuniting them will change his wife’s mind and save her life.
• An old man on the subway causes a commotion when he starts yelling in rage at the woman sitting beside him. The woman tries to calm him down but he just gets worse. It turns out that he’s her father, who she’s been taking care of for the past three years. She’s very close to reaching her tipping point – her life has been falling apart since she started caring for her sick father.
• A woman finds herself running late while on the subway. Just as she was about to get off her stop, the man sitting beside her prevents her from getting out of the subway car. She is livid! Because she didn’t get off her stop, she has missed a very important meeting – one that would’ve changed her life forever. This meeting was the last task she needed to complete to get her life back.

These are basically the ideas I wrote down during last night’s commute. Like I mentioned in my last post, I didn’t want to edit myself. The point of Everyday Stories is that I just write whatever idea I can think of during the moment without judging how great or crappy it is.

So what about you? What story ideas come to your mind when you read about the old man and the woman on the subway? I’d love to read them!

So how does something so gross have an effect in my writing? It woke me up.

For the past few months, I’ve been juggling different things left, right and center. I’ve neglected some projects that I was really excited about (keeping up this blog for example). I procrastinated. I put things off. I got caught up on the little things – things that weren’t really necessary or important right now – and this made it harder for me to accomplish the small goals I had set for myself a while back. The worst part is knowing that I could’ve checked off those goals on my list if I had just kept working on them. But instead, I’m still somewhat standing on the same spot from where I started.

Long story short: I saw the man a couple of metres ahead of me squatting near a huge pillar, automatically thought the worst (he’s doing #2! Must. Get. Out.) and walked quickly away from the area as fast as I could. When I got to the office, my story definitely got the poop jokes started for the rest of the day. And because everyone got a kick out of this story (friends on Facebook expressed their amusement on my wall) I started thinking: how many ways can I use this for a script? What story ideas can this do for me? And that’s when my mind woke up and started doing the brainstorm dance (ideas just kept rolling in my head). The original ideas led to a whole new group of action steps I haven’t thought of before. Not only was I coming up with several premises, but I was actually getting my motivation back! I suddenly want to get back on the projects I’ve put aside and I came up with other creative projects I’d be interested in pursuing. I even got ideas on some changes I could make on my current projects.

With all of this commotion in my head, I need to write them down. So why not blog about it? I have to admit that I’ve been a bad blogger – I don’t have a consistent schedule to post my writing online, so I just end up not writing much at all. But I might be able to solve this.

For the past few months, I’ve been writing my Morning Pages (from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way) and I’ve surprisingly kept it up since I started since June 20th. Every morning, I write 3 pages. The content isn’t what matters, it’s the process. And I can successfully say that Morning Pages is now part of my daily routine and it’s a habit that I just…do. So, if I can do this everyday, I should be able to write  on a scheduled basis for this blog, too, right?

The Action Plan

I need to get back to the main reason I created this blog: to be a storyteller – offline and online. So besides the web series I’m currently working on with my talented friends, I’ve decided to start something on this blog I’ll be calling Everyday Stories. Inspired by what I witnessed earlier today, I’ll be writing posts where I take something from everyday life (it could be mine or someone else’s) and I’ll list the story ideas I come up with for it. Maybe I’ll even write a scene and post this script online. Maybe I’ll encourage people to take these scripts and put it on film. Maybe I can get a collaborative storytelling community started. Or not. Who knows what will come out of this, but I’ll try it out anyways.

Oh, and I definitely want to write additional posts on my experience of producing a web series DIY-style. I did start this back in April and a lot has happened since then (re-shoots, re-writes, and lessons learned). It started with us (4 actors/writers) who wanted to create a web series and, now that a few months have passed by, we’ve learned so much about the other things, like production and editing (and we still continue to learn something new).

Inspiration is Everywhere

Yes, I was disgusted with what I saw this morning. But now that I think about it, that event actually snapped me out of this rut that I’ve been in. And you know how people usually have a story or two to tell everyone? Well this could be mine, I guess. It’s bizarre, yet amusing. And everyone loves to hear stories – it’s what connects us all to one another.

Joan Didot got it right: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.“

(via Go Into The Story)

Television is all about character. Films are typically more about story. For a TV show to work, you have to have a reason to come back every week.

The quote above is from Canadian writer/director, Martin Gero, who was interviewed in this article on the Globe and Mail (along with two other Canadian writers). I thought it was a great read for those interested in tv comedy writing. Here are some quotes from the article that I’ll be taking with me as I write for my upcoming projects:

“My rule for running the writers’ room on How I Met Your Mother is simple. It’s all about character. And the thematic discussions that come from the essence of that character. Is it time for Barney to have a real relationship? Is Ted due for a career change? After three or four days of spinning ideas, a writer goes away with a fairly detailed outline. Each episode takes roughly three weeks.” — Chuck Tatham

“The trick to coming up with stories is to steal from your life and other people’s lives. One episode of The Simpsons was about a school closing due to a blizzard. The kids were so excited, but woke up the next morning to no snow. Off they went to school, only to get trapped there when the blizzard finally hit. That happened to me in Exeter. Only we didn’t put the principal in a volleyball sack.” — Tim Long

“My advice to those getting into TV comedy is, first, order two lunches. Because when 4 o’clock arrives, and you’re famished, you’re a staggering, 230-pound mess. Second, always make sure your characters need each other. If you do that, you can have the craziest, most disparate characters together, and it works.” — Chuck Tatham

So in my last post, I mentioned that my friends and I are creating a web series and that we were going to film the “first few episodes”. Talk about ambitious! We were able to film the one episode and, wow, we learned a lot by doing this all on our own. I’ve read my fair share of blog posts and articles online about creating your own web series and when they tell you that there’s a lot of hustling and hard work involved, they weren’t kidding! I’m here to share our experience so far with our very first web series. If any of you have some insight/advice/feedback, don’t hesitate to comment – all is welcome and appreciated

Our web series is called How To Be A Friend and it’s sort of a mockumentary about a group of 4 friends who create their own web series of how-to advice on friendships. In each episode, the girls tackle on a different situation and give their advice on how a “good friend” would handle it. The only thing is, their viewpoint of what a “good friend” is might be slightly different from ours or mine.

The plan

• We wrote brief summaries for each of the 8 episodes we have lined up and we decided that we’d improvise each episode and follow the outline we wrote for each.
• Filming with a DSLR (Nikon D90) and recording the sound using an external audio recorder (Zoom H4n).
• Edit using Final Cut then upload to YouTube/Vimeo.
• Aim for 2-3 mins. per episode (max 4 mins.)
• Create a website for the series
• Use social media to promote it (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo)

On Set

We all arrived on set at Kelsey’s apartment and began planning our shots. We got a friend of ours from acting class (Andrew) to help us with the camera. Overall, filming was smooth. We didn’t really experience any problems with the camera and the mic (well, there was this one time where I pressed “playback” instead of “record” haha but that was quickly fixed). We mostly shot everything in one take, except for the last 2 very short scenes where we had to switch locations.

Notes after Day 1

Now that we all got the idea of how filming one episode for this web series would be, we decided to talk about what we’ve learned and what changes would we make for the future episodes. Here’s what we’ve learned:

• We need a script: Improvising the episode was fun, but we ended up adding more time than we originally planned. (We initially thought of improvising because we thought it would be a faster turnaround and that we’d be able to film more episodes in one day.)
• Character development: we’ve started off with great characters in this series, but we all felt that we can go even further for some of them.
• Plan out the shots: after uploading the video and audio files on my mac, I started to try and do some editing on Final Cut. Most of our takes were all in one shot and each shot was around 5mins. Wowza. For the next few episodes, I proposed to do a variety of shots (wide, close-up, etc.) to see if that would be easier to edit.

We had an amazing time on Thursday doing the DIY method for this web series and now we’re even more excited to go on and film the upcoming episodes. Hopefully, we’ll have something to upload (even if it’s a teaser) very soon. We want these episodes up as soon as we can, but we want them to be great, so we’re going to make sure we take our time on the edits before we launch it to the world wide web

I guess that’s all I have to write about for now. If any of you have suggestions, tips, or resources you’d like to offer, don’t forget to leave a comment! Or send me an email. Thanks again for reading this post. Now I’m off to go learn more about editing with Final Cut!

I’ll post updates soon!

If that becomes what’s expected of you, at some point you have to decide to excuse yourself from that expectation and say, “Well, I’m not sure I can do all that.” But what I can continue to do is to continue to follow my curiosity and my path and create work that I think is reflective of what I’m really interested in and just share it with you, and you can take it as you like it.”

- Elizabeth Gilbert

Artists and those that launch the untested, the new and the emotional…wrestle with this need all the time. How can we proceed knowing that there’s a good chance that our actions will fail, that things might get worse, that everything won’t end up okay? In search of solace, we seek reassurance.

So people lie to us. So we lie to ourselves.

No, everything is not going to be okay. It never is. It isn’t okay now. Change, by definition, changes things. It makes some things better and some things worse. But everything is never okay.

Finding the bravery to shun faux reassurance is a critical step in producing important change. Once you free yourself from the need for perfect acceptance, it’s a lot easier to launch work that matters”

- Seth Godin

(Thanks to Jill Gollick for the find!)

- Unknown