Jen Grisanti, A Person You Need to Know

So you're in your mom's basement, sitting on a fold-out chair and surrounded by thousands of abandoned scripts for TV pilots and movie ideas, smashing your head on your trusty Smith Corona typewriter and wailing about the cruelty of it all. Still reverberating in your head is the advice given to you by your parents at the last family meeting, "Give up and get a day job."

Why did things turn out this way? Why didn't Spielberg or Nolan return your calls? What can you do to remedy this cruel injustice?

Well, I'll tell you.

You can read this interview with the queen of Hollywood scriptwriting, Jen Grisanti.

You can take her advice to heart, move out of your parents house, and get to work!
  

Jen Grisanti

Hi Jen, how are you?
I'm great today. How about you?

Wonderful, thanks for asking. Let's start right off with talking about your new book that's coming out this March called Storyline: Finding Gold in Your Life Story. Without giving too much away, what kind of advice do you have for those with a story to tell?
The book is about fictionalizing your truth, so it's about writing from an authentic place. I go pretty deep into how writers can draw from their own emotional well and add fiction to it in their writing so it's not writing from an autobiographical place but writing from a place of truth and adding fiction to it.

Sort of like writing what you know but with pizazz to give it a little "wow" factor?
Exactly. Say for example you're writing a TV spec script and you're writing a Modern Family or The Good Wife, and you are looking at your own personal well of information and figuring out how do I draw from some of what I've experienced in my own life and put that into my characters and situations so that I'm coming from an authentic place? Which means your voice will come out in your writing and you'll connect with your audience.

It really is about learning how to draw from your well in order to connect with your audience.