Hey everyone welcome back to the screenwriting life. I'm Meg Lafour

and I'm L'Orian McKenna. Today we are thrilled to be joined by Jessica Benninger.

Jess is a writer-director known for thoughtful female- driven comedies like Bring It on and

stick it which she also directed.

So we get a lot of questions from our listeners about using archetypes with our characters

to our advantage when writing but still make them complicated and compelling,

which Jess's work is known for.

So we'll be discussing that in addition to Jess's amazing career.

First and foremost, welcome to the show, Jess.

I'm thrilled to have you here.

Oh my God, so nice to be here, you guys.

Thanks for having me.

I was lucky enough to meet Jess and see her in action when we both mentored at the

Merrill Street Writing Lab and had long conversations on a bus which I'm

sure we talked about archetypes but I've always been so drawn to how you think

about story Jess so I'm thrilled to share that with our audience.

But before we get into it, we're going to talk about Adventures and screenwriting or what we did

this week. So we'll let Lauren go first.

Lauren, how was your week? I have no idea how my week was, but today this morning, which

as far back as I can process right now, I was driving home after dropping my daughter off at school and I was listening to

serious XM with my version of the radio and a song came on and it's a song I love and I started

singing really loud and I turned it up and I was like dancing and it just made me feel so good and I remember I got home and I parked and I felt sad like oh I wish I could be in my car more and then I thought but wait a minute I can do that anytime I want so I made a point with myself that at 10 a.m.

...