Lesson 11 should be in your inbox in less than 90 seconds.
I started teaching in Houston. I returned to Houston from Los Angeles as work was steady enough that I thought I could just fly into Los Angeles whenever needed.
There is an organization here called SWAMP (Southwest Alternate Media Project) that has a storied history of helping filmmakers in Texas.
It was the early 2000s and I would teach screenwriting Monday nights in this small house that SWAMP used for its offices.
I had a dry erase board and that was it.
I usually had 8 students in a class.
And I loved it. I fell in love with teaching.
I encourage anyone who wants to really learn a subject to teach it.
It forces you to see the subject in a whole new way.
This was the first time I was tasked with explaining what I did as a screenwriter to another group of people.
I quickly realized a key feature of teaching that made me a much better writer:
When you verbalize something you have been doing out of instinct, you convert it from a mysterious choice that may or may not be there when you need it, to a tool.
And that tool now is always available when necessary.
For example, I didn't always write in 8 sequences.
It was something I noticed when breaking down the structure of movies every week.
Along with everyone's writing, this was always the homework in class. We broke down a movie's structure and examined it.
(I recently ran into an old student of mine who was nominated for an Emmy for his documentary work for NASA. He was very generous about how much this exercise helped him even in his documentary work.)