[spb_text_block title="PODCAST - Second Challenge Check-In" pb_margin_bottom="no" pb_border_bottom="no" width="1/1" el_position="first last"] The Second Challenge Check-In! By Jacob Krueger [/spb_text_block] [divider type="standard" text="Go to top" full_width="no" width="1/1" el_position="first last"] [spb_text_block title="The 2017 Screenwriting Challenge!" pb_margin_bottom="no" pb_border_bottom="no" width="1/1" el_position="first last"]   Greetings from Thailand! You can probably hear the sounds of the jungle and of rushing water around me. It’s been raining here for the last 12 days, and pretty much every path has turned into a river. Nevertheless, it’s been a pretty magical experience. As many of you know in addition to my own little writing retreat, I’ve been here for the last couple of weeks studying yoga and meditation. And I recently participated in a life-changing meditation, created by AUM Humaniversity, that I wanted to share with you with this 2017 Screenwriting Challenge check-in. The meditation was nearly three hours long—12 stages of 12 minutes each. And each stage focused on experiencing an emotion that is normally feared or repressed. It occurred to me, of course, that this is a lot like writing. Writing takes courage. It takes a willingness to look inside that most people do not have. And even more courageous, it takes a willingness to look inside ourselves and put what we find there on the page—even the parts of us that we don’t very much like, the parts that make us feel exposed, or vulnerable, or weak, or unacceptable. There’s a myth about writers that we are in the fiction business. But actually the opposite is true. We are in the business of telling the truth through fiction: the emotional truth of our experience. As those of you who have taken my Write Your Screenplay class or Jess’s Meditative Writing class know, writing is like a dance between these two parts of your mind: the part that wants to create something that others will understand, and the part that has something it desperately needs to say. Something that may or may not be socially acceptable. Something that may or may not fit your career goals or your plans for your story. Something that may or may not be in a form that others will understand. This is where our characters come from. Not from an idea, not from a formula, not from what your conscious mind thinks is necessary for your story. But from somewhere deep inside. Somewhere we don’t normally access.   Your characters are simply a part of you that you don’t normally show to the world.   Jung called this idea the collective unconscious. His belief was that in our daily lives, we only experienced a very tiny bit of the universe—a very tiny bit of who we really are. But in our dreams, he believed, we could tap into the full universe that already existed within us. Not an individual experience, but a collective one—the metaphors we all share. The things that make our stories universal. In other words, he believed that the whole universe already existed inside of you. That every script you’ll ever write, every character you’ll ever create, every line of dialogue. Every possibility. It’s all there, in this part of your mind you don’t normally go to in your waking life.   I remember when I was first starting out as a writer, how much work it was to write.   I remember listening to famous writers talk about how they saw themselves not so much like a writer as like a scribe, that they weren’t actually “doing the writing,” but rather simply transcribing what their inner writer, their muse, their instincts—choose your word for it—simply transcribing what that force inside them was telling them. I remember thinking, what a bunch of horse shit. I didn’t have a muse like that. If I want to create something, I sat down and wrestled with it, and forced it into the shape I wanted it to take.