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Hi! My name is Madison North and I’m a Junior Film and Media Arts student in the Screenwriting Concentration! When I was younger I used to read a lot for fun and always enjoyed fiction the best, but as I got older it felt more like a chore to rude due to all the assigned readings I would get for school so I never really wanted to read in my free time. When I would read for fun however I would always enjoy imagine how the book would play out as a movie, really trying to pinpoint every aspect of the character and their actions portrayed in the story. Writing is something I’ve always loved to do. Movies and TV are something I’ve loved as well. Being able to combined my love for writing and my love for film is something that always stuck with me and the the idea of being able to write a movie is just so cool. Not only are you able to write, but you are able to see the thing you wrote play out in a visual medium, only further bringing you vision to life.

Being in the Screenwriting Concentration I write quite often and do quite a bit of reading, mainly of other students work. Most of the writing I do is for classes, but I want to get back in the habit of writing for myself. Writing is something I love to do, but when you are constantly writing for a grade it can talk the pleasure out of it. I really like the emotion writing can evoke out of people, the connection it can make us feel towards a moment or a character. I feel we as humans are all natural born storytellers, the things we write make us who we are. Everything we write about we can make a connection to in some way. Even if what we are writing about doesn’t necessarily pertain to our lives, there is always truth in what we are saying, we can connected to it in some way.

I really enjoy writing/reading coming-of-age type works. I think when people hear the term “coming-of-age” they automatically assume of a cheesy teen movie about high school, which isn’t the case. I think we never really stop “coming-of-age” so to speak, we are constantly growing up. As humans we all strive for happiness and love, it’s in our nature. The lessons we learn about these two things in life are universal and we are constantly learning new ones about them, no matter our age. Being able to express this through storytelling and writing is such an interesting thing, you are able to make people feel seen and heard. I think the most interesting thing about storytelling is that often we feel that the story we are telling only affects us, and yes it can be reflective off of our own experiences but other people can often find a way to connect it to their own lives.

I signed up for this class as a requirement for my concentration, but I’m really excited to take it! I’m excited to be able to analyze stories and not just scripts and to be able to write freely and not in script format. I like to write very detailed and descriptively, which isn’t always the best with screenwriting, it often needs to be pretty direct so the reader can visualize it and the director and actors can do what they want with it. I’m not too familiar with many authors but I do really admire Greta Gerwig and her writing. Lady Bird is one of my favorite movies and I think the writing in that is so well done. She does a great job of making conversations between characters feel very natural and believable. Even when the characters aren’t speaking we get such a clear sense of the situation and what is happening within a scene. Something I wanna work on within this class is writing less dialogue and using more action to tell the story. Often when writing I think I tend to think people need to be constantly speaking, which isn’t always the case, often times it’s better to let a moment play out then having characters lay everything on the table. Currently I am reading “Normal People” by Sally Rooney and I think she does a good job of having the characters actions express their feelings rather than their words. The two main characters of the novel are pretty closed off people so it would make sense for them to not feel very comfortable portraying their emotions through words. I think the expression “actions speak louder than words” has a lot of truth to it. I think you can learn a lot about someone through the things they do. Overall, I’m excited to for this class and to be able to strengthen my writing!