My name is David, and like many of you, I want to become a paid screenwriter. I haven't settled on a particular genre, which I consider neither a strength nor a weakness. I aim to tell original, compelling, and evocative stories about our shared humanity.
Admittedly, I'm new to screenwriting, but I'm not new to storytelling. In a previous iteration of myself, I was an entertainment reporter and movie critic on this thing called radio. As anachronistic as this may seem, radio is what got me interested in storytelling or the theater of imagination. Even though I was born in the '70s, my mother got me hooked on old radio shows from before TV times.
What got you hooked on storytelling?
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Great advice, David Blaustein!
Movies I watched as a kid got me hooked on storytelling, especially "Harriet the Spy." And books I read as a kid got me hooked on storytelling too. I loved the book fair.
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Maurice Vaughan I also loved the book fair! I can still smell it! Is that weird? Probably lol. I love how "Harriet The Spy" got you hooked. It almost always goes back to childhood!
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Following that dream, that calling, David is so important. Satisfying the desire to create and hopefully making a living doing it with hard work, dedication and patience is the magic. I wrote at a young age about daily occurrences and adventures me and my friends had in my neighborhood during my childhood. The need to scribe my experiences was always a love of mine, and that creative voice inside me kept reminding me of it.
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John Mezes I haven't really given this much thought, but meditating on where my desire to tell stories comes from along with what both you and Maurice mentioned, it seems that childhood is everybody's "story engine." It also sounds to me like your childhood plight of documenting daily occurrences and adventures has the makings for an amazing screenplay.
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A little weird, David Blaustein. Haha Book fairs were so fun. I remember some of the books. "Clifford the Big Red Dog," "Curious George," and "Captain Underpants."
The part in "Harriet the Spy" that got me hooked was Harriet writing in her notebook as she spied on people.
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I LOVE Harriet the Spy, Maurice Vaughan!
David Blaustein, great to see you! I think for me it was a love of reading that hooked me at a younger age. Especially growing up as part of the Harry Potter generation where reading was so encouraged and they made an event out of midnight book releases and film adaptations. It made it all feel like real magic and I wanted so desperately to create a story where the world could come to life and inspire so many people.
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I love the "Harriet the Spy" movie too, Ashley Renée Smith. I haven't read the book or seen the new movie yet, but they're on my lists.
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Hey David! Pleased to make your acquaintance.
In my case, it was not only to give myself a challenge in my life, but also to tell a good story. That's it. I didn't want to prove that I was a great storyteller, but that I had the ability to do this.
Since November 2022, I've been working on the pilot script for my own TV series called "The Leviathan". The logline is on profile if you want to read it.
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Hi David—so great you included a question. My friends encouraged me to write my travel stories down instead of just sharing them with friends. Found out storytelling is highly addictive—that flow state :)