Screenwriting 101: Pen Densham

“You have to look at being a story-writer and let that passion create stories, and see where there’s a place you might be able to find people to support them. There’s many more places than Hollywood to sell stories to, many more opportunities nowadays. It may mean you have to make an enormous amount of self-effort. If you create, you can’t delegate to someone else and expect the result to be as good as if you pursued it yourself. Which comes back to that logic of only create that which you’re most passionate about. The markets are there.

You did choose a medium to be an artist. This is optional. If this option feels good, then you’re growing as a human being, you’re giving yourself permission to live in a sensory world where everything you see and do can be a part of your creative endeavors, if you can live closer to your true nature, money isn’t so important as living happily.

Some of these byproducts hopefully come out of that thing while you pursue your creativity, one day one of these things gets to the screen. If they don’t get to the screen, maybe they can form into something else. Several of the scripts I find, I draw on when writing another script, kind of like jigsaw puzzle pieces fall out of other ideas and fall into the piece I’m writing, and that one’s really good where the others ones weren’t really as strong.

This process is kind of magical and it’s unknowable about what will happen. You must enjoy it, you must value what you’re doing as you do it, and you must not feel that the non-production of a finished script is a judgment of the finished work. It’s impossible for the number of scripts to get them all made. You chose already to play in a sport where winners are very few. But that’s the noble thing you chose.”

— Pen Densham

From Go Into The Story interview, February 2011

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