76 - How screenwriters find their voice (Encore)
Scriptnotes Podcast
John August
4.8 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 9 July 2024
⏱️ 60 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
John and Craig welcome Aline Brosh McKenna to look at what writers mean by a “voice,” and how it develops.
Some screenwriters’ voice develops long before their craft, leading people to label them as “promising” even though the scripts themselves are a mess. Other writers get all the technical stuff right from the start, but have a hard time finding something distinctive about how they write.
From there, we segue into one of the most contentious Three Page Challenges we’ve ever done, with wildly split opinions.
In our bonus segment for premium members, John the Eagle Scout gives Drew practical advice for wilderness camping in 2024.
Links:
- Aline Brosh McKenna on Instagram
- Spy Magazine
- Recitative on Wikipedia
- Three pages by James Topham
- Three pages by Cheryl Laughlin
- Three pages by Chris Vieira
- Submit for the Three Page Challenge
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Matthew Chilleli (send us yours!)
- This episode was originally produced by Stuart Friedel. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and is edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at [email protected]
You can download the episode here.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hey, this is John. Today's episode is One from the Vault. Back in episode |
| 0:06.5 | we talked about how screenwriters find their voice. Drew, tell us about this |
| 0:10.0 | episode and why you picked it. It's a three page challenge episode which we don't |
| 0:13.2 | tend to rebroadcast but it's just such great advice all the way through it's |
| 0:17.2 | about how writers find their voice it's a lien second time on the podcast |
| 0:20.9 | which is great but you guys talk about how you know some people have a |
| 0:23.4 | voice immediately but their scripts are kind of a mess and some people have all the |
| 0:26.8 | technical stuff right but they're having trouble distinguishing themselves so |
| 0:30.1 | sort of finding your way through that and developing your voice. |
| 0:33.0 | Absolutely. So this is way back to 2013. |
| 0:36.0 | So it's got 11 years ago. |
| 0:38.0 | But it's still relevant advice for people listening today. |
| 0:41.0 | So as always with a three page challenge, we'll put links in the show notes to the three page |
| 0:45.0 | themselves, the PDFs, if you want to actually take a look at the words on the page. |
| 0:48.8 | And apologies to all the writers who, you know, were dredging their work up after 11 years, but it's really good advice, so I figured it was worth it. |
| 0:55.7 | Absolutely. |
| 0:56.7 | And we are going to record a bonus segment after this, which is going to be about what Drew? |
| 1:00.3 | It's about camping. |
| 1:01.7 | I'm going camping. I don't camp a lot and you're an Eagle Scout. |
| 1:04.0 | Yes. |
| 1:05.0 | I need your help. |
| 1:06.0 | We will travel back in time to when I actually knew everything about camping and we'll talk through the |
... |
Transcript will be available on the free plan in -264 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from John August, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of John August and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.