Compost 2023’s Screenwriting Scraps So 2024 Can Bloom

Being an upcycling aficionado and 3^rd generation descendent of creative immigrants means I’m physically incapable of strolling past intact items lying helplessly on the curb. As a result, I once found myself in possession of a nauseating antique book extolling the importance of breeding with virtuous women (ie. chaste, white, and well-behaved). Cutting this actual rubbish to pieces and rearranging its words into humorous, feminist poems was a pleasure that can’t be overstated. I referred to it then as an act of healing but could have just as easily called it an act of composting.

Composting, as you may know, starts with a meet-cute between decaying organic matter and aerobic microbes, who surely wear leotards and leg warmers a la fitness-queen-turned-environmental-empress Jane Fonda. While we literally feel the burn – to borrow a phrase from Jane – of soaring planetary temps, these bacterial superheroes help us reduce emissions by transforming waste into nutrient-rich soil that many call “black gold.”

If composting our food waste can yield such rich results, couldn’t composting our writing waste do the same?

Channel your inner unhinged Pepper the Elf from Candy Cane Lane and use December’s ticking clock to motivate (ie. terrify) you. Gather up all the random sentences and disconnected thoughts languishing in your note-taking app. Add them to the scraps of scenes, snippets of dialogue, and stacks of half-written pages cluttering your desk or computer. Churn them up then break them down into ideas, words, letters, phrases. Use those bits as writing prompts. 

Let the detritus of stories past be the seeds of your 2024 climate screenplays.

Writing habits, page counts, and language skills only take us so far. Our experiences and resulting P.O.V. is what makes our voice specifically unique from everyone else’s. Create a list of potent experiences from the past year. Include the good, the bad, and, yup, the ugly. Journal about how each event impacted your feelings about yourself, your friends or family, a particular issue, or the world. Feel the depth and breadth of your feelings like you’re Anne gazing upon game show host Terry McTeer in Quiz Lady. When ready, use those emotions as a jumping off point for character development. 

Let your recent experiences inform the resilient, triumphant characters who will populate your 2024 climate screenplays.

Take stock of everything difficult about your writing life this year – the rejections, the self-doubt, the negative feedback, the lazy excuses, the failures, the missed deadlines, the unchecked procrastination, and any other inner or outer ouch. Don’t run from it like Charlie Cale dodges zaddy Cliff in Poker Face. Do, however, use her keen power of observation to root out the ways you’re lying to yourself. Then… accept what happened. Accept that you were hurt, that you felt flawed and vulnerable, and even, at times, like a fraud. See yourself as resilient – because you are. You’re a triumphant protagonist, dammit! 

Let the wounds of 2023 give way to the resolve and fortitude needed to create your 2024 climate screenplays.

Composting, like writing, requires time, patience, and room to breathe. You don’t have to love it like Zahn McClaron loves playing a police officer. (Insert applause for Reservation Dogs, Dark Winds, and Longmire here!) Commit to transforming the writing rot so you can bring forth a fertile and healthy writing landscape in which to plant your 2024 climate stories. The world needs unprecedented vision for these unprecedented times. Get ready to blossom.

Happy New Year, screenwriters! If you have ideas for 2024 climate screenwriting columns, let us know. Catch you on the flip!