Film Courage: Why do you teach your students three different types of story structure? You have The Hero’s Journey [Joseph Campbell], the three-act structure and then something that was new to me which is the Jule Selbo’s 11-step model.
Pat Verducci, Writing Coach, Teacher and Mentor: There are all these different story structure models out there in the world and they just have different terms but they’re all basically kind of the same approach to story structure. Every writer has a different process and a way of thinking about stories. I think it’s really good to expose yourself as a writer to all the different models and see Okay, which one helps me? and I think the important thing to remember is it’s they are forms, not formulas. It’s not something you should follow like paint by number like Here’s page 30, this is where the turning point, midpoint is on page 60. I really use these story models as inspiration rather than some sort of set of rules that I have to follow. I like to give my writers different tools to put in their toolbox and then to use the ones that are helpful to them. There are three that I really like and there’s others too that are really amazing but I don’t want to give people too many things which just makes them crazy and confused including myself by the way. I like the hero’s journey which we’ve already talked about and I use that which is the ordinary world the…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
BIO:
Writing Coach, Teacher, Mentor and Screenwriter Pat Verducci teaches two Advanced Screenwriting courses at UCLA TFT. She has written scripts for Touchstone Pictures, Witt-Thomas Productions, and Walt Disney Animation Studios. She has also worked as a story consultant for Disney/Pixar. She wrote and directed the feature film True Crime, starring Alicia Silverstone, and her writing credits also include documentary shorts for HBO and Showtime. She co-produced Somewhere Between, a feature documentary about four teenaged girls transracially adopted from China, and served as a story consultant on the Tinkerbell franchise for Disney. She is currently the script editor on several feature film projects for Film Victoria and Screen Australia, and is writing Citizen Bella, a documentary on the life of modern dancer Bella Lewitzky. Verducci serves as a mentor at Cinestory and the Meryl Streep funded IRIS/New York Women in Film and Television’s Writer’s Lab for Women. She’s a member of the Writers Guild of America.
BUY THE BOOK – SCREENPLAY: Building Story Through Character by Jule Selbo
CONNECT WITH PAT VERDUCCI
Advertisement – contains affiliate links
(As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases)
The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers
More affiliates:
Camera we use for interviews – https://buff.ly/3rWqrra
Editing system – https://goo.gl/56LnpM
Sound we use for interviews – https://amzn.to/2tbFlM9
Writers, try Final Draft free for 30-days – https://ow.ly/Gz4w30rDSKt
