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, how 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 everyone, so glad you could be with the that you are not alone on this journey.

Hi everyone, so glad you could be with us today. We're going to talk about the Long Road,

aka finding your beacon to help you guide the way in the long road.

Yes, the road is long. The road behind me is long. The road ahead of us as long. And I think that today it would be really cool to talk about ways to deal with it and how to approach it and look at it so that it doesn't feel quite so overwhelming.

Yeah, and yeah, exactly. And my biggest way of doing that and what I've wanted to talk about on the

show is finding your beacon and kind that is and how to do it and why it helps you.

Okay, but first we have Adventures in Screenwriting.

Lorry and how was your week?

It was, you know, another week.

I'm going to keep it very focused on my writing this week because it was a strange week.

I gave some final notes for to a director who's working on a deck for a feature I wrote to finally send that out to try to get producers for it.

So I wrote the script in 2017 speaking of the long road and have a director attached and now he's

working on the deck so just some few little notes and then hopefully that'll go out so I'm really excited about that and I have been spending a lot of time thinking about and reworking the opening scene in this pilot that I'm working on because I want the

opening scene to be something that, you know, grabs the reader by the throat and doesn't let go and that this is a script that I'm sending out to be read by producers or

executives that like they can't stop reading it so I can't have like a slow sort of lyrical lead in because that's not the tone that I want. I want it to be like, gotcha, right? So figuring out that what that is is such a tricky balance because it's you know even if you're

reading it you're still imagining it that it's going to be on TV so like how does that work

and how far can I push it and so it's messy but I'm having fun trying

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