Film Courage: So aside from being scared to write something, how do you know your
protagonist is someone that you want to write about, that you want to spend like years
working with? Kelli McNeil, Writer, Actress and Voice Over Artist: This has happened to me on a couple of occasions but eventually my
character starts speaking to me they have gotten so vocal that they actually
start talking with their own voices and to me that's almost like a state of
reaching like a runner's high it's it's rarely achieved when when I've done it
I've done it in about 4 of my scripts but those to me are the characters that
have the strongest voices and certainly have been the pieces and the projects
that have been put out into the world and have gotten me you know where I am
and the intention that I've gotten that's that's key to me is when those
voices are so clear it's like when I'm writing dialogue I don't even have to
think about what the response would be the character just automatically says it
to me it's it's a weird phenomenon but it it does happen have you ever had it
where the characters aren't speaking to you and then you're like I don't think
this is going to work yeah absolutely I mean part of being a good writer is
knowing when to walk away from something I had a book that I wrote that was 42
thousand words long it's the first book that had never written and I was
shopping it around and I found myself going to edit it and trying to figure
out what to do with it and like why it wasn't working why it wasn't resonating
with people and then I realized myself you know I'm 10 pages into it and I'm
bored the character just had no voice so I realized that that was a problem and
it's it's important to recognize those things in your writing you have to you
have to certainly be aware of what's working but you also have to be
self-aware enough to accept what's not working do you think you were scared to
give the appropriate voice to that character or it just from the get-go it
just wasn't the right sort of combination I think it just wasn't I was
trying to force something I was trying to I was trying to force a narrative and
you know I'm not saying you said you shouldn't wait for inspiration to strike
because you may never get inspired it's a
important to keep pushing through and keep pushing and you know right every
day even if it's even if it's bad you can always go back and edit I mean one
of the wonderful sayings and I forget who says this but you can't edit a blank
page edit so I mean obviously edit but you've got a right but it's it's
important to understand that there sometimes it's not working that's not to
say trash the idea there may be a time you know five or ten years later you'll
come back and you're like oh my god this is this is the key that makes that work
this is the piece that makes it fit together so just because you don't have
it at the offset does it mean that it's a failure it's never going to work
certainly save that work but just recognize when it's time to maybe move
on from something can you take us back to the first character that innocence
started talking to you that it was like this real person that was like almost in
your ear what was that like so the first character that started to
talk to me was for actually the first TV pilot that I wrote when I got signed by
my agents I didn't have a TV sample and they were like well we need a TV sample
to send you out so I wrote a pilot's and the lead in that show I've been mulling
this idea for so long I actually wrote it in about a week and the lead
character and that like she she had just been so real that when I started to
write her out I mean she's got a best friend and a daughter and this very
complicated relationship with her job and her ex-husband and she was just so
real to me and the character's name is Maggie whenever she would talk it was
just her voice just just coming out and that in turn just formulated you know
her her viewpoint of the world just formulated my decisions with the the
characters around her and everyone in this story just just came to life and
it's become my signature piece that my reps sent out to get my generals in my
meetings took you a week to write it yeah and how many pages is it this is 59
pages long because it's the TV it's like spy
in our two divided
you