Your Truth Matters

Writing is a very frightening endeavor for most people. We write to express ourselves, to emote, to relate, to understand, to make sense of, to examine, to shed, and, very often, just to be. One of the greatest goals of writing is to connect with your audience on an emotional level. To make them feel, to help them identify. How do you do this? You go inside yourself and explore your own personal well of emotion. So often in life we look for answers on the outside. Outside ourselves is where the activity is, so it’s only natural that we seek reason there. Yet, it is inside that we interpret and feel the effects of what we experience externally. To connect with others, we need to connect with ourselves. Your personal story is your gold and your true gift as a writer. The key to your success as a writer is understanding how to interpret and express your personal experiences in a universal way and learning to add fiction to your truth. However, looking inside ourselves is no easy task. It’s an obstacle most of us don’t know how to approach.

Going within means shining a light on what is. What if others see what is really going on inside your mind and heart? Are you afraid of feeling judged? Do you worry that they won’t love you anymore or that you might feel the pain of rejection? Are you afraid of feeling unworthy? What is self-worth? Do we ever really feel it?

What if our words hurt our family? What if our anger takes on a life of its own? Delving into our core emotional selves is definitely frightening, but if we’re totally honest, others will connect with us and our story. It is identifying our truth and having the courage to put it on the page that is our greatest challenge. Plus, often, when we put it out there, there is a sigh of relief. A weight has been lifted, and we realize that we are not alone.

Your truth matters. Chances are that the emotions you are burying inside are what millions of others are feeling and afraid to identify with. I have analyzed story for over 18 years. I helped launch many writing careers. During this time, I noticed one common thread tying together all the writers I’ve seen gain tremendous success: They understand how to look inside themselves for answers. Their writing reflects depth, emotion, and connection. They’ve learned how to fictionalize their own personal experience, allowing it to surface in their writing through the use of theme and symbolism and drawing audiences into the stories they tell.

As a television executive for over a decade at CBS/Paramount and Spelling Television Inc., staffing and working with writers, as well as developing story for top prime time shows, was my job. When I met with writers, I often asked about their personal stories. I did this as a way to understand how I could best market them to my executive producer so that they would have a stronger chance of getting the job. As we dived into their stories, I would often ask the question, “Have you ever written about that experience?” First, I would see doubt. Then, I’d see fear. Then, I’d watch their face light up and recognize that there was something worth exploring. Since I knew that completely autobiographical stories rarely transfer well, I taught them to draw emotion from these experiences as a way to authenticate and make their writing stand out. The results I saw were phenomenal. Suddenly, writers who hadn’t been staffed, got staffed. Writers previously stalled in development were suddenly selling pilots. Writers who couldn’t find representation suddenly had many agents vying for them. The key to their success was looking inside themselves.

My last staff job in the corporate world was VP of Current Programs at CBS/Paramount. After this, I started my own business in January of 2008. I identified a niche in the market with regards to story. I knew that what I was able to pull out of writers had value for their success. So, I started a business that purely focuses on the development of story. I figured that the best way to see results was through one-on-one consults. I give the individual writer their own personal development executive to help them navigate the terrain that often accompanies a career in writing. Since I launched my company, I’ve worked with over 200 writers. The results of the one-on-one consults have been amazing. I’ve helped writers get agents and managers, get staffed, sell pilots and helped the right people to see their work creating a possibility.

I also teach seminars. It was during one of these seminars that I came up with the concept of getting writers to write what I call a Log Line For Your Life. What is a log line? Wikipedia’s definition is, “A log line is a brief summary of a television program or movie, often providing both a synopsis of the program’s plot, and an emotional ‘hook’ to stimulate interest.” I tell writers to write their log lines by thinking about the setup of who, dilemma, action, and goal. You want to set up empathy for your central character, present the dilemma and the action that is taken, and the goal. Strong log lines often have irony in them. A perfect example is the log line from the feature, PRETTY WOMAN (Touchstone Pictures, 1990): “A man in a legal but hurtful business needs an escort for some social events and hires a beautiful prostitute he meets… only to fall in love.”

Personal log lines involve taking moments in your life and phrasing them in a way that makes a story. You can take a theme in your life or a life moment, add some fiction to it and see what you come up with. A log line that reflects a moment in my life is, “A new bride who lives in a fairy tale fantasy falls through a rabbit hole and when she awakens, finds herself President of Cheated On Anonymous.” A second log line that reflects a pivotal moment in my life is, “When a work-obsessed corporate executive experiences a fall from grace, she is forced to turn her plan B into her plan A and discovers that her plan B was her plan A all along.” Writing a log line is a way of detaching from your story and looking at it from an objective viewpoint. By going into your own life experiences, extracting your truth and learning how to frame it into a log line, you will strengthen your awareness of how to organize story and this will help you to write stronger log lines for your scripts.

You can start thinking about log lines in your life by thinking of universal life moments that you’ve experienced. By “universal life moment”, I mean moments in your life when your world was turned upside down and your sense of reality, as you knew it, shifted. Throughout this book, I will teach you how to dive into these moments and fictionalize them, writing log lines that reflect your universal life moments and helping you build and elevate the fictional stories that you are working on. When you write what you know, you write from an authentic place. Having the courage and the insight to do this will elevate your writing and connect you with your audience.

The beauty of this exercise is that it will help you relate with people in a new way. One group I did it with said that they’ve been sitting next to people for years in their guild and they had no idea that these stories were under the surface. They suddenly saw people in a new light. This is the gift of story. When you go inside and uncover what is there, you will be surprised by the depth it adds to the way that you write and how this depth will connect you with your audience. You will feel a passion that maybe you haven’t felt before, because when you write what you know, you write from your truth. When you write from your truth, you identify your voice. Your voice is what will set you apart from other writers.

From the Introduction to
Jen Grisanti, Story Line – Finding Gold in Your Life Story