writing – Page 46 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

09 More Edith Wharton’s Ghost Stories from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (32 seconds)

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In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —

“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”

I presented this holiday lecture “When Women Write Horror” on Tuesday, October 29th, 2019. Researching the many, many women who have written horror stories – in novels, films and television – brought new names to my attention who I am excited to start reading. I hope you will be, too!

Transcript:

Who has done anything with her ghost stories for Christmas? I think that’d be an excellent thing to check into. Her house is on a haunted home tour, right,, if you go through the UK. You can study her house. That’s her library. When you see libraries like that from the old days, those are usually the rooms that belong to men. Those were the man caves of their day, but this is hers. This room belonged to a woman who was a writer and its haunted by her spirit. So I’m kind of making myself want to go do this tour while I think about it.

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V1 Issue 1: Creating Authorship? Lindsay Anderson and David Sherwin’s collaboration on If. (1968) by Isabelle Gourdin-Sangouard

Highlighting the articles in the past editions of the Journal of Screenwriting, of which I am the Book Reviews Editor. Hopefully these abstracts will entice you to did a little deeper into the history and future of screenwriting. — Rosanne

Creating Authorship? Lindsay Anderson and David Sherwin’s collaboration on If. (1968) by Isabelle Gourdin-Sangouard

This article draws upon the research currently undertaken for my doctoral thesis and is meant to act as a complementary study of Lindsay Anderson and David Sherwin’s partnership on If. (1968), following Charles Drazin’s 2008 article for the Journal of British Cinema and Television, If before If. Charles Drazin (2008: 318) highlights the idea of a creative dynamic underlying the working partnership between Lindsay Anderson and David Sherwin on If., as well as in the subsequent projects they developed together. The following article aims to uncover the nature of the creative dynamic suggested by Drazin’s article by looking at both the personal and the artistic dimensions that the working relationship assumed. The aim is to highlight the distinctiveness of their collaboration in the cinema; the article will show that in the course of this collaborative work they realized their artistic potential through an exchange of expertise, and that their collaboration helped to bring about an alternative approach to the conventional opposition between screenwriter and director, especially when it comes to claiming authorship over a film.

The Journal of Screenwriting is an international double-blind peer-reviewed journal that is published three times a year. The journal highlights current academic and professional thinking about the screenplay and intends to promote, stimulate and bring together current research and contemporary debates around the screenplay whilst encouraging groundbreaking research in an international arena. The journal is discursive, critical, rigorous and engages with issues in a dynamic and developing field, linking academic theory to screenwriting practice.

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** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out!

08 Edith Wharton’s Ghost Stories from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 3 seconds)

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Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!

In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —

“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”

Transcript:

Now Edith Wharton is somebody people sometimes had to study in high school especially if you did an AP sort of literature class and she’s fascinating because she is the first woman ever to win a Pulitzer Prize. Which is huge for a woman right in 1927 — which I think is great — for The Age Of Innocence which was turned into a film. This is a whole section of her books here. We teach her in schools. Sometimes kids find her boring because the world she writes about was that world of proper manners and all that sort of thing and they have to really work through why this is interesting. I think we should teach some of her ghost stories. If we taught her ghost stories how more interested would an audience be and then maybe they’d want to read the more grown-up world and society that she’s, you know, satirizing. I think it’s really cool that she put out all these ghost stories back in the day. Afterward is her ghost story for Christmas, which is nothing more than what Charles Dickens did with A Christmas Carol. We read him every year. There’s been how many versions of a Christmas carol made into films including The Muppets which is the best one.

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V1 Issue 1: Tonino Guerra: the screenwriter as a narrative technician or as a poet of images? by Riikka Pelo

Tonino Guerra: the screenwriter as a narrative technician or as a poet of images? Authorship and method in the writerdirector relationship by Riikka Pelo

The article focuses on the invisible role of the screenwriter and makes observations about the screenwriter’s part in the process of writing a screenplay together with a director. By studying the two examples of the collaboration between the screenwriter and poet Tonino Guerra with the directors Michelangelo Antonioni and Andrei Tarkovsky, the intention is to follow the ways in which authorship is both constituted and shared in such a liaison. I observe how the craft of the screenwriter is understood in relation to the different aspects of his task. By focusing on the case study around the writing of the film Nostalghia/Nostalgia (1983), I also consider how responsibility in developing these aspects is shared between screenwriter and director during different phases of a screenwriting process: in gathering ideas, sketching, building the story structure, writing drafts, rewriting and completing the final draft.

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* A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs
** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out!

07 African-American Writers In History from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (53 seconds)

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In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —

“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”

Transcript:

We also have difficulty finding African-American successes in the past because those aren’t the stories that were passed forward. When we think about female writers who were African Americans Phyllis Wheatley is who we hear about in this time period right in this earlier time period excuse me. And then we Pauline Hopkins who was publishing ghost stories. She was an African-American woman in the period publishing in the Colored American magazine right? So this is an outlet for writers back in the day and she was publishing all kinds of stories that had to do with the ghosts of slavery. So she’s talking about a real piece of history and essentially what she’s doing is discussing PTSD without giving it that terminology that we’ve given it today. When you think about being haunted by the past — that’s a ghost story and this is what she was doing in the 1880s right? So just 20 years really 15 years past the end of slavery. So she’s a pretty cool person.

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06 LGBTQ Writers In History from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 8 seconds)

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In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —

“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”

Transcript:

It’s very difficult studying LGBTQ people from the past because we don’t have a definitive “here’s a piece of paper that promises you that I am gay” because it was against the law, right? So nobody did that. So scholars have had to find ways to say ‘Here are some pieces of evidence we can use to generally guess this was probably the story and being buried side by side is kind of one of them. Another is wills. Often people would grant their land to someone who had been their companion for many years rather than inheriting it to a cousin or some far-flung relative if they didn’t have children. So scholars have had to work hard to figure that out but I think it’s really interesting. There’s a thing in the UK called Places Of Pride and it’s a tour you can take of LGBTQ locations and her gravesite is one of them. So I think, she’s a really interesting woman. To read her supernatural stories and see what underlying theme — what was she trying to say about how we’re afraid of different things. People tell you what they really want as a message in their writing and I think that’s somebody we should know.

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V1 Issue 1: Cyber-Aristotle: towards a poetics for interactive screenwriting by Jasmina Kallay

Cyber-Aristotle: towards a poetics for interactive screenwriting by Jasmina Kallay

Through analysing appropriations of Aristotelian dramatic theory within interactive digital narratives (Laurel 1991, Hiltunen 2002, Mateas and Stern 2005), this article assesses the merits of Aristotle’s Poetics in providing a basis for an interactive screenwriting poetics. From the six components of tragedy (plot, character, thought, diction, melody, spectacle) to mimesis and catharsis, these concepts are examined for their value in a new media context. The hierarchy of the components is challenged and new formal and material causative relations are explored, using the interactive drama Faade (Mateas and Stern, 2005) as an example. With new dramatic configurations emerging (such as spatial plotting and narrative architecture), the question posed is – to what degree can Aristotelian thought really aid the interactive screenwriting process? If this approach can not yield substantial results, what is the alternative?

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* A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs
** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out!

05 Amelia Edwards from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 7 seconds)

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In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —

“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”

Transcript:

Now this woman really fascinated me. Amelia Edwards. She is known again for travel writing. She traveled the world and that was very fascinating. It’s what she published and got more fame for but in fact, she published ghost stories and there’s a whole collection of her supernatural and weird stories that was just put out again in 2009. So we’re having a Renaissance of looking at women as writers and thinking about the material they put out so many years ago. So I think that’s fascinating. What’s double fascinating. Women have been hidden in history as we know. Women have been hidden in the history of literature. Also, LGBTQ people have been hidden in the history of our actual public life and our literature. Turns out Emilia traveled the world with a widowed friend who never bothered to get married a second time and the two women were companions and did not ask for a male escort which was proper in the day for women to travel with a man to protect them and when they died they were buried side by side in this graveyard.

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V1 Issue 1: The protagonist’s dramatic goals, wants and needs by Patrick Cattrysse

The protagonist’s dramatic goals, wants and needs by Patrick Cattrysse

Screenwriting manuals tell us that narratives should have a protagonist and that a protagonist should have an important dramatic goal to achieve. With respect to this goal, manuals often mention another common distinction, that between a protagonist’s want and need. Wants are generally understood as external and/or conscious dramatic goals, whereas needs are defined as internal and/or unconscious dramatic goals. This essay argues that these tools could be made more powerful if defined in a more precise way. Whereas wants refer to the goals of characters at the level of story, needs play at the level of the interaction between plot and real audience. This re-definition links the wants and needs debate with the much wider and far more complex study of audience involvement and its relationships with the value systems expressed in a narrative and those experienced by a viewer; a subject which stretches far beyond the limits of a single article.

Get your copy and subscription to the Journal of Screenwriting Today!

* A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs
** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out!

04 Elizabeth Gaskell and the Salem Witch Trials from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 15 seconds)

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In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —

“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”

Transcript:

I think she’s really interesting because she brings the female gaze — the first female to write about the Salem witch trials right? We hear stories from the male perspective about these crazy bad women who were doing these witchy things and now we have a book from the female perspective. What was this really about and what is being a witch about? Is that about power and is that what scared all the men back in Salem that they didn’t want women to have power right and when we look into the history of the Salem witch trials we know that there are many possibilities for why those women were chosen? Among them, several of them were land-owning women and back of the day women weren’t supposed to own land. Only men were but if your husband died and you had no male kids you inherited it and the funny thing about Salem was the men who sat on the council in the city who decided if you were a witch or not when you were convicted and your land went up for public sale the men on the council got to buy any public sale land first shot half price. Just by accident, they were finding women guilty who happened to own land that was rather lovely for them to buy. So she’s looking at this period through this female gaze which we don’t teach in schools.

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