A WRITER'S VOICE: 'Diary of a Teenage Girl' - The Magic of Tone

Jacob Krueger discusses how tone does not begin with trying to be funny or trying to be sad, or trying to be dramatic, or trying to be melodramatic, or trying to make the audience cry or trying to do anything.

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Publish date:: Aug 26, 2016

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Tone is one of those really challenging things for writers, particularly on a movie like Diary of a Teenage Girl, which touches on some extremely controversial, taboo and uncomfortable subjects. In lesser hands, rather than being the delightful (but disturbing) movie that we saw at the theatre, Diary of a Teenage Girl would be a Lifetime movie: yet another tear jerking melodrama about a child victimized by an unfair world.

So in this podcast, I’ll be talking about how to control tone in your writing, whether you’re writing an original script, adapting a book or novel to screenplay form, or writing from the experiences of your own life. (In fact Diary of a Teenage Girl was adapted from a novel inspired by author Phoebe’s Gloeckner’s life experience as a child).

Click the image below to play the podcast or click here.