A Blog About This Blog

Soliciting your feedback about the future of Go Into The Story.

I do not often blog about my blog. Since my initial vision in launching Go Into The Story back in 2008 was to create a daily source of information and inspiration for writers, that’s pretty much what I have done to date for 4,065 consecutive days.

In that span of over 11 years, many things have changed. My very first platform was Blogger. I wish I had been prescient enough to take a screen shot of that layout for posterity’s sake, but as I recall, it was three columns with a bunch of links to other blogs on the left, archive links on the right, and daily posts in the center. The daily schedule for articles to go live: 6AM, 10AM, Noon, 2PM, 4PM, 6PM. That last post was my ‘above the fold’ article as it would hold the lead position for 12 whole hours. Thus began my pattern of scheduling the day’s Feature Post to go live last (just like this one!)

A few years later, I partnered with the Black List as their official screenwriting blog, eventually shifting to a new platform: WordPress. That offered more visual bells and whistles, but I had to learn a lot of HTML commands which added to the time I spent each day blogging. Plus, the site crashed several times per year which — obviously — was frustrating.

Then in October 2016, I transitioned to yet another platform: Medium. The blogging interface proved to be much easier to manage compared to WordPress which in terms of day to day operations made my life less burdensome. However, thousands of posts were corrupted in the transition process, so I began a multi-year project to update my entire archives. Yes, that’s right, one by one, fixing messed up script excerpt margins, replace lost photographs, refreshing lost video links, and the like. In many cases, I found I needed to update content based on the rapid changes in the film and TV industry. As of today, I am still in the midst of that long-term project.

Through it all from Day One, I have provided posts on Go Into The Story free of charge. The original rationale was that I wanted to provide people interested in learning the craft of screenwriting a no-cost website they could access which would provide them a comprehensive resource grounded in my decades of experience as a professional screenwriter and producer. I may not be an A-list writer, but I have been paid to write over 30 film and TV projects at every major Hollywood movie studio and broadcast network (except ABC). I also have over 15 years teaching experience which means I have spent a significant amount of time translating the experience of being a working screenwriter into a coherent take on all aspects of the craft for those aspiring to break into the business of writing for film and/or TV.

My commitment to providing free content at Go Into The Story extended to rejecting quite literally dozens of outfits approaching me over the years to advertise their product as part of some sort of ‘affiliate program.’ That is why you have never seen one advertisement for an outside vendor on this site.

But as noted, things change and this year, Medium created a paywall. I’m not sure of all the details, but apparently Go Into The Story is now behind it. I had no choice in the matter. In fact, I wasn’t even aware of this shift until several of my readers emailed or tweeted me about it.

Obviously, forcing readers to buy a Medium subscription to read the content on Go Into The Story is very much not in the spirit of what the site has been about. Fortunately, Medium has provided a way to continue to access content free of charge — via Twitter. With the exception of the Daily Dialogue series, I post links via Twitter every day twice a day to each current Go Into The Story article as well as 2–3 archived articles.

So if you want to continue to be able to access the site’s content without subscribing to Medium, you can follow me on Twitter: @GoIntoTheStory.

But this hullabaloo has caused me to step back to think about the blog’s purpose in today’s world over a decade after it was launched. Moreover, along with all the changes in platforms, technology, and the entertainment business as a whole, my life has gone through some significant transitions as well. Currently, I have these things going on:

• I have full-time job as a tenure track assistant professor at the DePaul University School of Cinematic Arts where I teach two screenwriting classes per quarter at the undergraduate and graduate film school level.
• I concurrently teach through ScreenwritingMasterClass.com, a unique online writing resource which Tom Benedek and I launched in 2010. The agreement I have with DePaul is during the school year, I teach one-week Core and Craft classes, and only hold the more labor intensive workshop Prep and Pages classes in the summer.
• I am writing a book for Palgrave Macmillan: “The Protagonist’s Journey: Character Driven Screenwriting and Storytelling.”
• I am working with a producer on ‘Snowbirds,’ a feature length film project I wrote and recently revived.
• And, of course, daily hosting Go Into The Story.

Somehow over the last 11 years, I managed to oversee my blog while doing everything else. I routinely work 80, 90, even 100 hours per week. This comes naturally to me. I am the son of an Air Force Colonel and was raised a Protestant, so the instinct to work is in my DNA.

Yet as much as I my default mode is to put my head down and just do the work, my gut tells me to use this time to pull my head up and seek your feedback. Here are some questions I ask you to consider:

• How do you currently use the blog? How often to you access it? What features are most important to you?
• What if I were to scale back the number of posts per day to 4, 3, or even 2? What type of content would best serve your needs in learning the craft?
• What do YOU need from this blog?

To be honest, this book I’m writing is a big deal. I am utterly passionate in promoting character driven writing and see this project as a counterpoint to the plethora of ‘how to’ screenwriting books which tend to focus on screenplay structure as plot. It’s not just plot, it absolutely must involve the psychological journey of the characters, most notably the Protagonist. Indeed, what I am exploring in the book is this premise: Begin with character. End with character. Find the story in between.

In my view, there is far too much attention in today’s online screenwriting universe focused on a script’s page count — this event has to happen here, while that event has to happen there —and an overall trend to simplify how to write a screenplay as opposed to embracing the mystery of character development and putting our trust in them to lead us into and through the story-crafting process.

This summer, I am currently ‘breaking the story’ for my book and taking a paid leave of absence from teaching at DePaul in the fall to pound out a first draft. Which is to say, your feedback about the blog will be most helpful to me as I strive to find a balance between my teaching, writing, and blogging, while still providing Go Into The Story as an ongoing resource to the online screenwriting community.

So there you have it. The Medium paywall crisis averted. You can support writers by subscribing to Medium. If not, you can access Go Into The Story content via Twitter links which I provide every day.

Bigger picture: Let’s use this moment to take stock about what this blog could and should be, how it can best help writers in their creative journey.

I thank you in advance for your feedback.

Onward.