Today I decided to revive my membership at Zoetrope.com, Francis Ford Coppola’s website with its many subdivided writing communities and affiliated Coppola business like movies and restaurants and the winery. Since I am investing more hours in this prose fiction thing this year, it seemed like their “Short Story” wing would be a good place to workshop some pieces. Sharing with friends is one thing, but with fellow writers there’s a chance I can get some more actionable feedback.
It’s funny – I joined Zoetrope for the first time way the H-word back in 1999, as a way to get my first screenplay read. I did the work of reviewing other screenplays somewhat grudgingly, but as honestly as I could. I remember that the writer of the first one I read was obsessed with the word “sinewy”. Every character was “sinewy”. The second script (I’ll never forget this) was an animated modern-day comedy adaptation of Moby Dick called Everyone’s Against Paley-Whaley. There was something demented and wonderful about that.
But that experience actually helped kick-start my development career, not just because I had already read and reviewed scripts before I interviewed for my first internships, but because it was really easy to bluff a resume entry like “script reader for Francis Ford Coppola’s production company” into more than it actually was back in 1999. On-line communities for screenwriters were still kind of new and magical.
I re-registered a couple of years later because I had reached junior exec status, and junior execs have to search in unusual places to find that one diamond-in-the-rough script or writer that can help them advance. I found one Western that I actually really enjoyed, but otherwise came up dry; which is okay. You have to read a LOT of forgettable and/or appalling scripts to find even one worth getting excited about.
This is my first time in the “Short Story” wing. I only needed to review 5 stories in order to qualify to post and read reviews of my own work, but I went ahead and reviewed 10, since, hey, it’s a holiday today. As it was with screenplays then, the quality ranges across the broadest possible spectrum, but I’ve got enough teaching hours under my belt that I’m steeled for that – welcome it, actually. While getting down into the nitty-gritty with someone really talented is intensely rewarding, I sometimes think you do greater good trying to figure out a way to get a message through to someone who’s very early in their development – eager but maybe not ready or self-secure enough to easily take advice on which path to follow.