Welcome to the Tennessee Screenwriting Association

I recently participated on a panel discussion at Vanderbilt University about careers in the entertainment business. A number of students who attended were interested in how best to get a start in screenwriting. I went through the suggestions we've all heard like:

read every book available on the subject, attend screenwriting seminars, watch all the movies you can, and of course, write, write, and rewrite.

But what made the biggest impact for those students oriented to the black and white world of math and science was "this business of emotions".

The entertainment business is an emotional business. That's why we go pay $8.00 for a movie or $12 for a music CD. We long to feel things -- are drawn to experience feelings like moths to a flame.

By Jeffrey Alan Chase

And that's where screenwriters come in. It's our job as writers to touch people deep within. To take them to another place where it's safe for 108 minutes to experience joy, anger, fear, passion or any of the other emotions that set us humans apart from a box of rocks.

The screenwriter has done his job when the image and/or dialogue on the screen hooks us and reels us into his celluloid world via an emotional string.

Movies are just pictures combined with sound. But makes the experience so powerful is the emotion that binds everything together. Without emotional content you've got cardboard cutouts burping lines of dialogue.

Hemingway once said, "Find out what gave you emotion; what the action was that gave you excitement. Then write it down making it clear so that the reader can see it too."

So, the best advice I could think of to give those students? Be an active participant in your life. Welcome every experience, both good and bad. Feel it. Then show me the bottom line in this business of emotions.