Hey, welcome to the screenwriting life. I'm Meg Lafour. And I'm Lorraine McKenna. We are professional screenwriters. We've worked together as a team and separately. We've worked on studio and indie films, live action and, from my work on Inside Out and

Captain Marvel. To my work in Pixar Story Department on Up, Brave, and Inside Out.

We are here to share our insights on the craft of screenwriting and also the lights,

had to not only survive the ups and downs but thrive.

We want to help you become the best screenwriter you can be

and to reassure you that you are not alone on this journey.

Hi guys, so glad you could be here today and happy new year.

Today we're going to be talking about writing your own narrative.

Yeah, we went back and forth on how to really define this subject. It feels like it's somewhere between, you know, defining your success for yourself and self-talking your way into loving your own writing. So it's sort of a big topic.

Big topic and yet we have a phrase for it that we're excited to it.

Yes.

But first, let's get to our week or what we call adventures in screenwriting.

Well, and of course this is longer than a week because we took the holiday off.

So we have not actually seen each other lorian that we text every day for three weeks.

So how was your how is your week how was your holiday how was your first work of week back to work?

I was all prepared to talk about this week but then you mentioned that we haven't been doing a show since mid

December and I sort of panicked because I have no memory of December, you know, because every day feels like a full year.

This week, I've been a little distracted.

Things are going on in the world.

I watched a lot of the news.

But it's interesting on Monday, I had a chat with my manager about a script I submitted to him and I submitted it I think sometime during the break and I so I had about a week away from it and I before I heard from him I read it and I read it as if I was reading someone else's script and they paid me to give them notes.

So and I noticed some things that I hadn't noticed before about structure and character and just from that like sort of outside view I had some pretty big notes for myself so when I talked to my manager you you know, he was really excited about it, which was awesome and a relief. And before he could even give me notes, I was like, okay, I want to talk about these things. And I brought up all of my notes and to get there we came up with a strategy about how to address those notes and how to

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