239 | Wicked Co-Writer Dana Fox on Why You're Avoiding Your Writing

Dana Fox offers an incredibly generous admission in today's conversation: "I find writing REALLY torturous." And yet, she's one of Hollywood's most successful writers, having written on major franchises like CRUELLA and recently WICKED, which has earned her countless industry award nominations. What's her secret? Tune in as she discusses why writing can feel so hard and how she pushes through those blocks - or perhaps more fittingly, defies gravity.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Meg: Hey everyone. Welcome back to The Screenwriting Life. I'm Meg LeFauve.

Lorien: And I'm Lorien McKenna.

Meg: And today we're thrilled to be chatting with Dana Fox, who is co-writer of one of 2024's biggest movies, Wicked, and '25, I think. Other films for which Dana has sole or shared credit on include Cruella, The Lost City, What Happens in Vegas, Couples Retreat, and How To Be Single.

Lorien: On the TV side, Dana created and showran Ben and Kate starring Dakota Johnson and Nat Faxon, and she co-created and show-ran Home Before Dark for Apple TV+.

Dana: Hi! Thank you so much for having me. I'm a huge fan of both of yours. This is so great.

Meg: Oh my gosh. We're so lucky you're here. Especially in the middle of your awards run. My gosh, so exciting. We can't wait to talk to you about all things Wicked and craft of writing and the art of being a creative human being. But first we're gonna do adventures and screenwriting or how was our week? And we'll let Lorien start. Lorien, you go first.

Lorien: So this week I am working on one main project, which is a TV show pitch. And I love the project and I love what I'm doing and it's so fun and I got to the part in the pitch where I have to, you know, write out what the pilot is, which of course means it's adjusting things in the characters. You know, as I'm figuring out what the pilot is and the mechanics and the relationships, I have to go back and forth between what I think it is and what it really is.

And it got to a really hard, frustrating part. So I thought, I'm gonna walk away and go for a walk, except I didn't go for a walk. I thought, I'll just open up this other project I have and that'll be fun and easy. And then hours later and I hated all the work I'd done. I don't even know what I was doing.

Like I think I was somehow in my brain, you know of course, delaying going back to the project that I actually had to finish. And I was really disappointed in myself and beat myself up a little bit. And I realized that I have to set timers because I will just get into that hyper-focus space and...

It's not wasting time 'cause any work I'm doing that's writing or grinding on something is good, I guess. But I just didn't feel good at the end of the day. So today I am setting timers. So that's how my week was. It was bouncing between many projects and trying to figure out what I'm actually focusing on.

Meg: Hot tip of the day.

Dana: Set a timer.

Lorien: Set a timer, 45 minutes.

Dana: The Pomo, the Pomodoro method. They, these people, they love their timers that are shaped like tomatoes. My mom does it all the time.

Lorien: Oh, okay.

Dana: You get a tomato. It's a tomato timer. It's called the Pomodoro method. And it's like, I forget what the minutes are because I can't remember numbers, and I also have a very loose relationship with time.

But I think you set it and then you do the work, and then you get a little 15 minute set to do a relaxing thing, and then you set it again.

Lorien: Wow.

Dana: Pomodora method, ladies and gents.

Lorien: Yes. If it goes up to 45 minutes, 'cause that seems to be my magic window where it breaks me out of the hyperfocus, pops me out of the thing I get stuck on so that I can walk away from a minute and come back and look at it slightly differently. Rather than being in the the whirlpool. So, okay, I'll go get myself a tomato. Here I go. Yeah.

Dana: Tomato time.

Meg: Dana, how was your week?

Dana: My week was a very different week from the kinds of weeks I normally have. I would say normally my weeks are realizing that I've worn the same pair of sweatpants like four days in a row, and that I need to change those sweatpants into the other pair of sweatpants that is the exact same pair of sweatpants, but it's just not the one I've been wearing for four days. And, you know, staring at my computer. But this week was totally different. This was no sweatpants. This was all HMU all the time. I have so much respect for actresses, I could not do this. If you told me I was gonna have to do this for another week, I would quit the business.

I'd be like, I can't do it. I can't sit in a chair and get hair and makeup for two and a half hours before I go to the event. Like for me, that's the event. I've gone to the event. If I've done two and a half hours of anything, I gotta go to bed. So the fact that I had to then go out and chitchat with people after that was like, I don't understand how these people do it, but I'm so impressed with these women and how they get out there.

And it is a job, a J.O.B. job. They make it look really fun and easy, but holy shit, it's hard. So I've been doing that and then I haven't gotten notes yet on the project I'm working on. So this is the first time in like 160 years that I have not had actual writing that I was supposed to be doing and it's wild. I'm like, Will Ferrell in Talladega Nights, I don't know what to do with my hands. I'm just floating in space. And I'm sure I'll go back to having a zillion things to do next week, but this week it was just press events for Wicked, which is really fun.

Meg: That's so fun. That's so fun.

My week, we'll do very quickly 'cause we wanna talk to you is I, you know, have the high concept job. Which I love, and I'm writing with my partner and husband and it's, I'm having fun with it, but I'm not, I can't quite get into the river yet. Like my brain intellectually keeps saying, but that midpoint and what are the stakes?

Like I, I can't get past the intellect yet, and maybe that's just where we are, but at night I do my passion project and it's literally like getting into a warm bath. It's like, even when I don't know what the hell I'm doing on it, I don't care because I'm in the river. The characters are talking to me. They're, they're moving.

It's just like that beautiful, like, I don't know what that is. It's just so great. And now I want it for the other one, of course. Now I'm judging the other one 'cause I'm like, well, I should be doing that on this one. But it's so interesting, isn't it, that I wonder if it's the pressure of the job that keeps me from getting in the river.

You know what I mean? Like, if I could just do anything I wanted maybe my dreamer would come forward and be like, who cares about stakes? Just, just enjoy. But it's so interesting when it's a job and there's expectations and you have to hit a bar and you have to, it's very hard for my brain to let that go. I guess it's the producer side of me 'cause I was a producer, and so my producer is just like, let's go, let's go and it's not good enough. And I want to just ask you, Dana, honestly, friend to friend, writer to writer, does that ever-- you, you do so much and your work is so amazing. Do you ever have that? Or do you just naturally start flowing?

Dana: Oh, no, no, no. I only have that. I only have that. You were talking about the river and I'm like, this lady's great but I'd have no idea what she's talking about. Like, I only have the hard one, the bad one. I always say to people like, I write so that I can make things.

I find writing like borderline, like really torturous. I do know what you're talking about when the characters start to talk to you. That does happen to me. So like if I get everybody in the right place and in the right scenes and then they're doing sort of basically the right stuff, they do start to say things to me and I do start to just write down what they say. And sometimes they say the weirdest shit and I'm like, why would that person say that? But I have to write down 'cause they said it to me, so I gotta type it. And I usually tend to listen to that. But no, I only have the version where I'm thinking like, I know that the midpoints not gonna work in 15 pages from now, so I can't enjoy where I am right now.

I think you get to a certain point in your career where you really do, you're like good enough to understand how bad you are. That's where I'm at.

Meg: Yes, that's it in a nutshell.

Dana: I've gotten good enough to understand how shitty I am at this job. And I feel the ceiling banging up against my head constantly and I really wanna push through it and what I've learned is like, stop thinking about that. That's too much pressure for yourself. So I actually like having jobs and deadlines and people breathing down my neck because that's the only way I ever go, "well, you know what? It's never gonna be perfect, but I gotta get it done."

Meg: That's where I'm right now, like it's due, just ...

Dana: Just get it on the page.

Meg: Just take a version.

Dana: Take a version and then we can fix it later. Yeah.

Lorien: And I think that's my problem is that this is a pitch I'm writing to take out, and I have to be done with the pitch in order to share it with my reps to be able to take it out. So I, I have this space of like, I'll just go do something else. Because I really thrive on like, you have a week and you have to write three different versions of this pilot before it's due to the network. And I'm like, okay, I will steal every bit of time from every bit of place, but I had, you know, six hours yesterday to, I guess, fuck around.

Dana: Fuck around with a non-tomato, no tomato timer around. You're just like, whatever. Yeah. I find with pitching it's interesting. Like I really love pitching, like I think I might be better at pitching than almost anything else. I am a fish in water when it comes to pitching and one of the things I think is why I like it is because I released myself long ago from the idea that you have to pitch something in like any kind of narrative order. Because I remember, I, the, the way it happened was I pitched What Happens in Vegas to Greg McKnight, who is my now agent, love him to death.

And I was pitching to him and I was telling him the story in chronological order. And there's a thing that happens where like the concept of the movie sort of happens on page, I dunno, 10 or 15, where it's like these two strangers, they meet in Vegas, they get married, they wake up the next morning, not drunk, they realize they're a terrible fucking couple. One of them puts a quarter into a slot machine, wins a million dollars, they're about to get a divorce and the girl's like, well, half of that is mine motherfucker 'cause we're married. And then they spend the rest of the movie falling in love as they get a divorce.

So like that was the concept of the movie, but I pitched it like: she wakes up, she reaches over to her bedside table, she gets to the blah, blah, blah. He wakes up, he reaches over to his bedside table, which is actually a mini fridge and he takes a beer out of it. And I thought it was so adorable 'cause I was like setting up who the characters were, whatever. Greg, like, I'm not kidding when I say, I think he actually fell asleep like in front of my face.

He was the only person sitting there too. It wasn't like there were a bunch of other people. It was literally just him. And he fell asleep. And then like I said the concept and he like woke up and was like, whoa, that's a really good idea for a movie. And he was like, okay, never do that again what you just did.

And I was like, what? He said, tell people why they wanna buy it in like the opening two sentences and then go back and tell them anything you want. Because once they know they wanna buy it. They will care about your stupid character stuff about she reaches over to the bedside table because they know they're gonna make money off of this idea.

So they'll, they'll be awake and they'll be paying attention. So that began this whole journey I have with pitching, which is like, I do it in concentric circles. I basically, like, I pitched the logline, I pitched the poster, I pitched the trailer, and then I pitch the movie. And I don't ever pitch anything emotional until the very, very, very end, because then I can get people crying because like they've been on the journey with me of what the story's about. They know the characters, they know who everybody is, and they know where they're going. And then I actually pull out the emotional story and just pitch that by itself at the end. And everybody's crying and I'm like, okay, great. Goodbye. Have a nice day.

Meg: So at the end you pitched the emotional thematic kind of, this was about this and she learned this through this relationship, blah, blah, blah.

Dana: It's either at the end or it's when it feels the most relevant in the story in terms of like, when I've got people hooked and I can tell they care, then I pitch the stuff they care about. Because most executives aren't like plugged into their heart centers, you know, until they know, until the money makes their heart centers light up. When they know they're gonna get rich off of it, then they care about their emotions. So yeah, so I usually, it really helps me to think about pitching as like not linear at all. It's almost like order of importance, you know.

Meg: The other great thing about that system is you'll know in the first five minutes they're not buying this.

Dana: A hundred percent. I see the faces. I'm like, I should just leave.

Meg: So you could just wrap it up, like skip that whole B plot. Skip that, skip that, 'cause they're not buying it. You know, immediately. This is, they don't wanna waste their time, you don't wanna waste their time. So you get through it. And I've also been like, but let me tell you another idea because I know you're not buying that one. You're not buying that.

Dana: Totally! You see those dead eyes and you're like, oh shit. All right. Well let's get outta here. Totally. No, for sure.

Meg: Right. That was amazing. That was amazing. And I, we could just talk about pitching for the rest of the time, but we do have to talk about Wicked and then we're gonna, we have so many other correct questions for you.

So, what brought you into Wicked? And you're working with the original writer of the Broadway show. Yes? Winnie?

Dana: Yes. The greatest. Winnie Holdman.

Meg: So how did you come into Wicked and how was it to work with somebody who's so close to the material that you are coming into work with?

Dana: I was called by Jon Chu, who I had worked with before on my TV show at Apple TV+ called Home Before Dark. He had shot the first two episodes and actually he brought all his people with him. So I was fortunate enough to have Alice Brooks, who's the DP of Wicked, shoot my TV show. I had Myron Kerstein, the editor of Wicked, edit my TV show. So I had like the dream team with Jon Chu. I had such a good experience with Jon that I said to him, like, for the rest of my life, I will drop everything I'm doing to do something for you whenever you want.

And so I think it was like years, a year or two later, he calls me and he says, okay, I've got another one for us. And I was like, okay, great. I said, I don't wanna know what it is, the answer is yes. And he's like, are you sure you don't wanna know what it is? I was like, no I don't care. It could be anything. And the answer is definitely yes.

And he said, well, it's Wicked. And I was like, oh, whoa. Okay. My, my secret at the time was that I had not actually seen Wicked, so I was like. So in my mind I was like, of course I love Wicked. And then I was like, do I love Wicked? What is Wicked? I sort of was like, oh shit, I can't see Wicked because we're in the middle of a pandemic, so I can't pretend. I was like, oh my God. So I got online. I looked at every single YouTube video I could find. Every foreign country, every single pirated, shaky ass video of this play in every country. I basically put the entire play together in like two second increments on YouTube. While, you know, like listening to the soundtrack, so I was like, no, I get it. I got it, I got it. It might be like a little Germany, a little France, but like I got it.

So I sort of felt like I understood it. I read the play a million times and while reading the play I would play the music and like really think about the music while I was reading. I would play out the whole song and then I would keep reading the play and then I would play this next song. So I really like, felt like I got very into it. And then I met with Winnie and Stephen and Jon on Zoom for 158 hours before we ever put pen to paper. And that was sort of like our development process. We were breaking the movies in half, you know, breaking the play in half, making it into two movies.

Re-breaking both of them and then kind of like, you know, basically outlining both movies before we actually wrote. And Winnie and Stephen were so generous to let me be a part of this process. I think they had been working on it for a while and you know, I think it, they were really close to it, frankly. Once they brought in Jon, they knew, you know, Jon knew that he wanted to like, sort of have another person in there to be a part of the group. And so I was super lucky that it was me. And you know, Winnie was so extraordinary. I mean, I'm obsessed with this woman. I like want to be in her family. I'm trying to figure out like ways of exchanging blood so that like genetically were, we're actually related now, but I just adore her. She is so smart and so warm and so generous. And Stephen Schwartz is such a genius and like this, I felt like I was in a masterclass where I was the only person in the audience. I had Jon Chu, Winnie Holzman, and Stephen Schwartz, and then I'm like womp womp, in the corner. But I felt like my job was to be the person who didn't know the play very well and who was gonna be the audience member who didn't know the play very well.

And so I think it was actually, I mean, they've subsequently said it was really helpful to them that I was like asking these questions that theoretically are kind of dumb questions, but they led to really interesting answers. I'd be like, no, but what is Elphaba like? What powers does she actually have? Like so she can fly, but she appears to be able to do spells, but only when she has the grimmerie, is that correct? You know, just like very specific like rules of the world, world building questions that I think really help them to sort of be able to see the movie as the movie, and the play as the play. You know, it was a huge challenge and we all felt this like deep and profound sense of responsibility to the fans because they love the play so much and we knew we wanted it to feel, we wanted them to be happy. First and foremost, we wanted the fans of the play to be incredibly happy. Then we were like, okay, but now we need kids who have never seen the play.

Now we need grandparents whose only access point to this is Wizard of Oz. Now we need moms who saw the play when they were younger, who now have kids who are the age that they're bringing them to the movie. Now we want like gay men who..

Lorien: And we don't remember the play.

Dana: Right. And some of us don't remember the play.

Lorien: I saw the play, and I brought my daughter and I'm like, well, I don't remember what happened. Like I remember it, but not really.

Dana: Right. So, exactly. So we knew we were like reintroducing the play to people. We knew we had to have all those people be in the audience. And so I think my job was kind of representing people who didn't know the play, people who weren't like mega fans. Of course now I'm like a crazy mega fan who like paints their face green and I'm like, I'm worse than all of them. I bought every single collab piece of merchandising that was available for this movie, which you all know was everything on planet Earth 'cause the marketing department just went bonkers. So I became a mega fan, but at the beginning I was just like a fan of these people. I just thought these people were lovely. And so I kind of remained this like almost more like mediator, neutral party person who was sort of like, yeah, I hear that there's the reprise, but like, you guys have to remember that reprise isn't in the same thing anymore.

That reprise is a year apart. Like, so the feeling of a reprise is like, oh I remember that emotional state I was in and then now you're bringing that song back. But now they're saying different things and, Oh my God, that's so emotional because I felt that other thing in the beginning of that other song before. Now it's a a year apart so you have to sort of like remind the audience musically of what you're saying to them. And then sometimes we had to like create actual scenes or moments to help bolster those things. And I think for Winnie and Stephen, it was really fun for us to go on these diversions and be able to do things that they couldn't do in the play, but they had always wanted to.

 You know, they had always wanted to show baby Elphaba or toddler Elphaba, that was like a dream of theirs. Now they can do it, you know? Whereas on Broadway, it's like, you get a kid, you paint that kid green, they're on stage for 30 seconds, you've ruined their life. You know what I mean? You just sort of can't do that in a play. So we had a lot of fun creating these moments that weren't in the original, but that felt like they were part of the DNA of the original.

Meg: I love that.

Lorien: Can you talk a little bit about the relationship between Glinda or Ga-linda, who becomes Glinda in the shift in their relationship? Like how did you earn that? Them being friends and believing that Glinda might be real? Right, because the way you set it up with her at the beginning.. You know, she's such a character in the beginning. She has such a unique perspective about her place in the world. And then that shift towards the end of the movie. How did you earn that? Were there any bumps where you're like, I'm not believing it?

Dana: Well, I think it's so funny too because like I, I believe that the best job a script can do is to inspire the actors, the director, the creatives that are gonna come after you to like pour their absolute best work into the thing.

I don't believe scripts are these like hermetically sealed things where it's like, I'm mad if they don't do exactly the line that's on the page. I am so joyful when I see someone ad-lib or change something, but within the character that has been created. Like if they can ad-lib correctly, that means you as the writer did your job well.

So interestingly I do think like Ariana had a lot to do with selling the believability of that arc because she just refused to believe that Glinda was this superficial asshole at the beginning of the movie. Like she I think, fundamentally understood that everything that Glinda does comes from a place of longing and a place of desire for that magic. Like she's so desperate for that magic that Elphaba has, that she does not have. And so, and by the way, you said Ga-linda and Glinda, for the first like four months of the job, when I was working with everybody, I thought they were having like strokes, like I didn't understand.

They kept, I was like, why did they keep changing the name? And then I was like, oh, okay. So she changes her name at a certain point in this thing. So then you know where you are in the story if they're calling her Galinda or Glinda but it was like, for a while I was like, am I supposed to-- do I know how to do that? What is that? Why do we keep changing this girl's name? Anyway, so that was a delight to hide that from everybody. But anyway, I, I think that g Glinda, you know, it was all about finding the humanity in both of those characters. And Cynthia so deeply believed that Elphaba was not like grouchy and defensive.

There, there were these sort of bigger personality traits that Glinda and Elphaba had that kind of, I think on stage make more sense because you're playing to the back of the room just as much as you're playing to the front of the room. But when you're right up in somebody's face, it's a whole different story. You need this depth that is like, really, it goes way deeper because the camera's right up there. And I think both of them knew that it was all about their own pain. It was all about the sort of things they created to put up so that people wouldn't notice how in pain they actually both were.

And we all do that, right? Like we all have deep pain and then we put on our masks and we fake it till we make it. And so I think for the Glinda transformation, you see it in No One Mourns the Wicked in her face. And I was like obsessed with No One Mourns the Wicked because I felt like what an amazing opportunity to... you meet a character and you know that she's an unreliable narrator in that moment, but you don't yet know why, and you can tell that she doesn't feel the thing that she's saying out loud with her mouth. Like, what an amazing opportunity for an actress. So all of that stuff was like so juicy to me. The really hard part for all of us, and especially for Winnie I think, because she had the burden of this from trying to do this with the play, was Glinda arriving at Shiz and meeting Elphaba and that handoff of point of view. Because really, if you think about it, that first song is like Glinda's telling Elphaba's story. She's sort of like, once upon a time there was a girl named Elphaba and dah, dah, dah, dah. And then there's this incredible POV shift where we leave Glinda's point of view and we kind of come into Elphaba's point of view and now the story is about her emotional arc actually. So that was a really difficult piece of material there. Like we rewrote her getting to Shiz like 568 times. It was really hard.

And then we're introducing new characters. We've gotta understand how Elphaba's dad feels about her, what her relationship with her sister is, we're meeting the school. We have to world build at the school in a way that you don't have to do in the play. We have to set up the idea of the animals as being persecuted and see the history of what the animals were like at the school. I mean, it was a lot of information. And then of course, Jon Chu's a genius and he made it look so easy. But boy did we suffer over those.

Lorien: Yeah. I just got really anxious listening to all of that. Like, oh my God. Because when you watch the movie, just like when you know, you got Inside Out, you're like, oh, what a great intro. But like watching Meg and Pete and Josh Cooley, and Ronnie trying to figure out what the opening of that movie was and all the things it had to serve. But when you watch it, you're like, yeah.

Dana: I watch Inside Out and it feels so breezy, easy peasy, breezy. But my brain, the whole, the whole time my brain is telling me this was so hard to make this look easy.

And I'm always like, Dana, stop thinking about that. Just watch the movie. And then I go on a plane and I watch Inside Out, and that's where you really can cry hysterically. Plane Inside Out is the best inside out of all 'cause you're like hysterically crying in front of strangers. It's so fun.

Meg: Oh my God, that's funny.

Lorien:  That's how I felt watching the opening of Wicked. I just re-watched it with my daughter and you know, she loved watching it for the second time because she's like, ohhhh. And she's like, oh wait, the animals are up there when the wizard..

Dana: When the thing falls down. Yes, yes.

Lorien: Well, she wants to be a director. Right. So she's putting all these visual clues in the background together in a way that when you watch it the first time, you're like, okay, you put it together a little bit later. So she loved watching that. And I was like, oh, this is fun.

Dana: I always say the second viewing of Wicked is better than the first, because, you know, the first time I saw Wicked, I was so overwhelmed. There's a lot coming at you. I mean, it's great, it's a great experience but I spent the whole first time I was seeing Wicked just being like, I can't believe, I just couldn't believe it. I could not believe it, and my brain could not process fully what I was seeing. And then the second time I saw it, I was like, I like relaxed into my seat. Because now you know everything's gonna be okay 'cause you saw the movie and you know you're okay, you know you're in good hands and so you could really relax and enjoy all these like, I mean, Easter Egg Central in this movie. Like the Easter eggs are everywhere. And Jon and Alice Brooks had all these shots that they had designed so that everybody could find anything they wanted in any frame of any moment of that movie.

Lorien: My daughter kept shouting the elixir! The elixir! There it is! She's like, I bet if I do freeze frame, I'd be able to find it in every scene. I'm like, oh God, why am I raising a director?

Dana: I love your daughter because we talked about that damn elixir. We were like, where are we putting, we gotta put it in. Where are we gonna put it? We gotta blah, but we don't want it to feel like we're blah blah blah. Like we, yes, we talked about that for like a week and a half. So I'm glad she enjoyed all of our, all of our little elixir moments.

Meg: I wanna go back a little bit to something you said, which is about Glinda's longing. You know, there's a big kind of movement now to talk about wound and sometimes Lorien and I are like, careful of that word because, you know, you still have to keep this plot ball in the air and sometimes you don't wanna do flashbacks. But it also is the door, that longing, emotionally for you the writer too, right?

 And it's, you have this giant thing that was such a big success. You're working with the original writer, and yet it still has to be yours. It still has to feel personal to you. What, what in Wicked, really was kind of an emotional writer for you in terms of your relationship to it and why it was about you?

Dana: That's such a nice question. I mean, I was lucky enough that Stephen and Winnie also really wanted me to feel like it was mine too, which I think is a beautiful thing about them. And they know that everyone who watches the play feels like it's theirs. And so I think they understood that each person has to be able to feel like that. So it was really generous of them to let me be able to do that. But for me, I think my thing was I have these female friendships that are so deep and so intense and profound. And I'm married to a man, he's the best. Have a husband, have kids and the whole thing. And, and I do have certain female friendships with, which I would say are like the loves of my life, you know? And there is a depth to it that is, of course, it's platonic. Well, I'm not saying of course it's platonic, I mean, maybe we made out one day, I don't know. But it is platonic. But I understand that it's almost a romantic love and it, you know, there is no sex involved in it, but it is truly almost a romantic love.

And so I think for me, I really plugged into their friendship and I really plugged into the way that they were scared to meet each other, because they knew they were meeting the person that was gonna change the rest of their lives. And sometimes you're not ready for that and that it scares you. And I've had that experience, like I've met girls who I was like, oh no, I'm gonna, I am in love with her and if I start this, I, this is like, now I have this person I'm so in love with and now I have to care for the rest of my life about this. Ugh, this is terrible. So I really relate to that idea of like when you meet the love of your life.

Lorien: I love that that's your response to like intimacy. "Oh, no, no."

Dana: It's the worst. It was my same response to having children. I'm telling you, I like, I had my first child and I was like, oh, fuck. I have ruined everything.

Lorien: Yeah.

Dana: Because now there is this person on earth who if something bad happens to them, I die. I literally die. I leave Earth. So I know I could have kept myself safe before if it was just me, but now I have to keep, now this person has to be alive and okay or else I, I fly off a cliff and never come back. Like, and that feeling of that out of control.

Lorien: Should we look for the Western skies for you? Is that where?

Dana: You should look for me at the Western skies, because I have to get outta here because it's so painful. I mean, and love is scary as shit. And I do think that deep, profound love is incredibly scary. And I love the way that their relationship was a dance about that. It was like they met each other, they were like, oh, shit. And they, they hated each other because there was something in each other that they loved so much that they wanted, that they didn't have. And then the dance occurs, and the Ozdust happens, which I, I can't get through the Ozdust. I've seen this movie 72,000 times. I can't get through the Ozdust without crying. It upsets me so much. It's so beautiful. Largely because they were so visceral in that actual scene that like those moments did actually happen, like. Ari didn't know that Cynthia was gonna cry, and then Cynthia started crying and then Ari said, it's okay and then they, you know what I mean? It was like, it was all so real. And then of course, Alice beautifully happened to be there swirling and catching it at the exact right moment.

Lorien: The dance scene?

Dana: The dance scene in the Ozdust ballroom.

Lorien: So my daughter tells me that what she learned is that Ariana didn't know what the steps were.

Dana: Yeah. They didn't learn. She didn't learn 'em ahead of time. Yeah. She was actually following Cynthia. Yeah. So a lot of it, what you're seeing is you're seeing them experience it in real time. And they didn't do it that many times 'cause they knew it was like this thing, this little lightning in a jar that they had to catch. And then of course, Jon, who is the greatest person of all time, you know, he makes everyone feel so safe and so included in the creative process while having the, the most clear-eyed vision of what he wants. And yet he puts his arms around everybody and makes everybody feel like they can create within that space of his vision. And so I think that scene is such a perfect example of it all working together in the same moments. And then of course, Myron, the incredible editor, puts it together in this way that like, you can't help but feel all the feels. But I, I just love that. So anyway, point being, I think what I related the most to was their friendship and the dance of falling in love with someone.

And knowing that it's gonna ruin your life because you love them so much, and then wanting to avoid it, and yet being like, well, now it's too late. I love you. What am I gonna do? That was where I really clicked in. And we had, you know, when we did cards, we did the cards for the story. And so we had all the scenes on cards, but then Jon also had post-its that were pink and green, and they went alongside every single scene and the pink and the green were the emotions. And so it was like, this is Glinda's emotion in the scene, this is Elphaba's emotion in the scene. And then we also were always aware of what their emotion was towards each other. So that was a really helpful thing that I will take into other projects, which is like you can't have a scene where you don't also have the emotional post-its available for the people in the scene. If you don't know what that is, then you don't have a scene.

Meg: That's amazing. That's amazing.

Lorien: Meg had this really good point on a different show where she was talking about, or maybe in one of our Q&A's. She was talking about the beginning of each scene on a card you have the plot action and the emotional action at the beginning and the end. And a lot of writers focus on one or the other and it's so hard to find that dance. 'Cause you can move the emotions around, you can, what do you put out first as a writer here? Is it the plot? Is it the emotion? Is it both? How are you crafting those things for that magic?

Dana: I think it depends on the movie, but for me it's, it's both at the same time always. Like I don't totally know how to do plot in the absence of character. Because I was taught when I first started in the business, I went to producing school. I went to the Peter Stark producing program because I thought that was sort of like a type a good girl thing to do 'cause obvious, you know, I came from a family where my dad didn't have any money. Like it, there was no possibility. Telling my dad I wanted to be a screenwriter would be like saying, I'm gonna put on a beret, I'm gonna smoke a cigarette, and I'm gonna never make one penny for the rest of my life. Like he would've been like, that's not happening, you're not doing that.

So that was not an option in my family. So I went to grad school for film producing 'cause I was like, well that's business, my dad will let me do that. So, I went to the Peter Stark producing program and then in that program I took a screenwriting class and I had to write 30 pages of a screenplay. And I absolutely loved it. And in retrospect, I think I loved it for a couple of reasons. There was a lot of blank space on the page. There's a lot of white on the page. And cut to 20 years later I realized I am dyslexic. And so I think that I saw that page and it looked, it made more sense to me. It looked cleaner to me. I could read it. I could read it fast. Whereas when I would read books, I'd be like, arrghhh, you know. And I was an English major at Stanford. I like, I clearly made it through somehow, but it was always so hard for me. I also was an art history major at Stanford, and I did a lot of talking about paintings and I would write papers about paintings and I would try to get you to see what I wanted you to see in the painting.

And I realized like, that's screenplay writing, without the dialogue basically. That's the description of trying to get someone to see what you want them to see in visuals in their head, but through writing is screenplay writing, so I was like, oh, I kind of feel like I've done this before, even though I've never done this before.

And then, my amazing screenwriting professor named Bobette Buster, love her, shout out. She pulled me aside and was like, you're really good at this you shouldn't stop. And then she also said, don't ever let anyone convince you that structure is math, that it's architecture, that it's hard, that it's masculine. People will always try to tell you that men know how to do structure and women know how to do character. Don't buy into it. It's not true. Structure is just character and emotion. That's all structure is. It has nothing to do with math. It is literally just a character going on an emotional journey in a specific order. And American films tend to have a specific order. This is what happens on 10, this is what happens on 20, this is what happens on 30. But those things aren't mathematical. They're emotional. And, you know, emotions and you know people, you'll be great at structure. And that was so freeing to just be able to think of it in a way that I understood it as, and that changed my whole life. And so thank you Bobette Buster.

Lorien: Thank you for saying that. I got really emotional when you said that because I've always been told you're good at character and dialogue. And we've said this on the show, character is plot, character is structure, character is theme, but I haven't integrated it in a way. So thank you for your screenwriting, professor.

Dana: Well, you wanna know, the one that actually loosened it up for me the most, which is really interesting, is-- so we, the way we studied it is that we took a bunch of movies and we broke them down and we figured out what happened on all their, you know, the key plot points. And ultimately they were all emotional. It was all just like, oh, now the character's in a new world and they feel confused. They don't know what's going on on page 30. And then on page 45, they make an unconscious step in the direction towards their true desire, not their their want, but rather their need.

And then on page 60, they make a conscious step towards their want or towards their need, away from their want. So she had us break down a bunch of movies and they all kind of linked up to these places and I sort of was like, oh, I get it, I get it, I get it. The one that totally cracked it open for me was The Fugitive, and it's because anybody would say that Harrison Ford is the protagonist of that movie, right? You'd be like, oh yeah, he's the lead in the movie, he's the main character, of course, he's the protagonist. But the protagonist, as I learned it, is the person who changes. The antagonist is the person who like causes change in the protagonist.

So actually, Tommy Lee Jones is the protagonist of The Fugitive. Every single plot point in that movie is keyed to an emotional change on Tommy Lee Jones' journey of either believing or not believing what Harrison Ford is saying. Harrison Ford starts that movie, he's like, I did not kill my wife. Second plot point, he's like, I swear to God I didn't kill my wife. The third plot point is like, I fucking told you I didn't kill my wife. And the end of the movie is he's like, see, I didn't kill my wife. He does not change. He is the same dude through the whole movie. It doesn't mean he is not the star of the movie. It doesn't mean he's not like incredible and amazing. But Tommy Lee Jones starts off the movie. He doesn't believe Harrison Ford. Harrison Ford does these things that he starts to go like, well, that behavior is not that of a person who did kill his wife. That actually kind of feels like a guy who didn't kill his wife. And then gradually he goes from, I don't believe you, and then he says, I don't care, to I do believe you and I do care. And so every single plot point is actually, it's a Tommy Lee Jones moment, not a Harrison Ford moment. And they usually, they have Harrison Ford in them. Like he jumps off the thing and you know, flukes into the water but it's, you land on Tommy Lee Jones' face going, holy shit, would a guilty man have done that? So it's like there's an exciting plot point with Harrison Ford, but the emotional plot point is on Tommy Lee Jones and that's what actually determines the structure of the movie. And, and if you think about it, like he's us. He's the audience. So that's the journey we're on.

Meg: I love that. All right, I'm going 'cause that's so amazing that now I just have to jump to craft because...

Dana: Oh yeah. Hit me with craft. That's great.

Meg: I want to dig around your brain some more. A question that Lorien and I get a lot, which, I have to be really honest, I don't know how to answer this question. Okay. So I'm gonna ask you and so maybe you have an answer.

Dana: I mean, God help me.

Meg: People say, how do I write great dialogue? How do I learn to write great dialogue? What is great dialogue? And I always just am like, I don't know. You write great dialogue. So you do, do it. So I just, how do you, so maybe to ask it in a different way, how do you approach it? Do you have anything that you judge your own dialogue on? Or is it just people talking in your head? Can you look at that very first thing you wrote that was 30 pages, and now look at your writing and see the difference in the dialogue craft?

Dana: Well, I think for me, I'm a big believer that each person, like Lorien, and you were talking about your process and how you are with time and how you are with focus. I'm a huge believer that every single screenwriter is different and that your best bet in life to becoming good is to hack yourself, is to figure out whatever your specific life thing is. You know, I had a lot of fear and anxiety when I first started writing because I didn't wanna be bad. And it, it terrified me the thought of being bad because I was Type A and I was, I got all A pluses growing up and I was like, where's the report card? How come nobody's telling me I'm great?

So I, I had to deal with a lot of anxiety. So I hacked my own process through handling my anxiety. So, for example, I was working on Cruella for two years. I was getting very stressed out by how, how hard that was. And you know, I had never worked on a big piece of IP before and I'd never really understood how, as I'm sure you do get this Meg completely, if there's a huge company with a big piece of IP, it's like there's a lot of pressure on how you're doing, how you're making the choices. And every choice is interrogated, and is it the right choice? And I don't know because this is you, we've got 150 years of Cruella Deville we gotta deal with here, you know? And you're like, okay, ugh. So I had a lot of pressure on that and I started to get really stressed out when I would get notes. And I would find myself, like my heart would be racing, I would get hives on my chest and I'd be like, I can't believe this is like me opening an email with notes. This is crazy. So I said, I have to fix this, this process is killing me. And so what I started doing is I got, I would get on a treadmill. I would be on the treadmill for 20 minutes, and then I would open the notes document on the treadmill while all of the like happy, whatever the chemicals are in your brain when you exercise, we're flying through my brain. And I would read the notes and I'd be like, these aren't that bad. Okay, I can do this. And like it just changed physically my entire feeling around notes. And so I started to be like, I don't actually hate notes that much. I actually like notes 'cause it gives me something to push against.

And these people are smart, and I like the notes they're giving me. So I changed the way my body felt about notes, and then I started liking notes. And then later in the process I realized the only time they ever stop giving you notes is when you're fired. That's the only time they're like. Great job. And you're like, huh, hello anyone, anyone? And then you're like, oh, I'm fired. Okay, got it. So if you are getting notes, you are not fired. It's good news. You still have a job. And so I started to like love notes. And so for me it's been a process of finding every single one of those things that was getting in the way of me just getting the work done and doing it well and getting that stuff out of the way. Figuring out whatever I had to do to get that stuff out of the way.

So for dialogue. I would say that you know, it's a little bit like watching people box, sometimes. Scenes, you know, where it's like mostly in a conversation nobody just like punches another person in the face and the other person just sits there and gets punched in the face. The person moves and like gets outta the way of the punch and then ducks, and then punches the stomach instead of the head because the other person was expecting the head. So sometimes I think of it as like boxing, which is totally weird 'cause I hate boxing and I've like never watched it. But sometimes I think of it like that if the scene needs to have that kind of energy. Other times I think of it as nobody ever says what they actually mean. Like people are constantly lying all day long because usually they're lying to themselves, not other people.

So I think a lot about that and how a lot of times people think what they're saying is the truth, but that's because they've lied to themself inside themselves. So I think about that with dialogue. I tend to also not get hung up on anything while I'm writing. If I don't know the answer, I put it in bold and I keep going.

I just put, and I put a line like: he says something that is real fucking mean about that. Boom. And I put that in bold, and I just go to the next thing and I just keep going and I keep going and I keep going. And then I start my day with the bolds, because that's usually when I have the most energy to attack things that I think are hard.

So I wake up, I have a coffee, and I do some bolds, and then I just keep going. So I think with dialogue I do a lot of editing of my own work. I do not have stuff come out of me beautiful. Like I have some friends who are extraordinary writers who just like, do, do, do they like type and I'm like, what the fuck just came outta your hands? That's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. I do not relate to that at all. I have to put the very bad version down on the paper first, and then I, and then I craft. And I craft. And I craft. And I craft. And by the time somebody else has seen it, it's my 15th draft. So people are like, oh my God, you're such, this first draft is so good.

I'm like. Okay. Yeah. Well, it's my 78th draft, but thank you. I appreciate that. So when you said your dialogue is good, I'm like, haha, that's adorable. My dialogue is terrible, but I work really hard on it and I edit it a lot and then I try to make it not terrible. And usually it evolves taking words away. It's like, it's almost always taking words away.

Meg: I'm exactly with you. Amazing. Yeah. We have one more craft question 'cause I know.

Dana: Okay. Amazing. I love this. I could stay here all day. I love you guys.

Meg: No, I know you're coming back on the show.

Dana: I wanna hear your answers now. I'm like you guys, come on, let's go. Tell me your answer. I need to learn from you guys.

Meg: I'm dragging you back to the show.

Dana: I would love to. You guys are amazing.

Meg: All right, we have one more craft question. Actually two because we have, we ask the same craft questions to everybody so we have two. Lorien, do you wanna ask the TV one?

Lorien: Yeah so, this is selfish, right? It's on TV shows. How do you create, how do you know when you have a strong TV engine? That is, episode to episode you have a clear show. Why do I wanna watch the next episode?

Dana: Thank you so much for asking. And the answer is, I don't think I do know. And here's why. Because yesterday, literally yesterday, I was saying, I know when I have a great hook and I am amazing at hooks. I could come up with hooks all day long. I wake up in the morning and roll over to my husband and I'm like, okay wait hold on, and he's like, da, da, da, da, don't tell me the major motion picture you came up with in your sleep. I can't do it. It's 7:00 AM.

And I'm like, okay, but, so I can come up with a hook left, right, and center. It's crazy. But my hooks generally are stories that I think should wrap up in a movie length. They don't go on and on and on and on. So I don't, I think, I don't know about that engine question. And I think for me, what I'm hoping the answer is, and again, I think this is largely related to like the way the business has changed and how we all have to be really nimble and we have to sort of do what the business wants and, but kind of not, you know, be our best version of ourselves within what the business is allowing us to do at this moment. And I think the business is budget seems to really hold people back right now. So if you can think of an engine that doesn't require a shit ton of money and is not set in another time period, for example, that is helpful. But my hope is that a really good engine is is character based, but the truth is that doesn't sell the show.

That makes people love the show. And the example we were using yesterday as I was asking TV executives to help me figure out when I do have a good engine, is they were using the example of Ted Lasso, which they were saying like, look, the, the engine of that show is, is that team gonna do well or not? That is number 958 on everyone's list of why they watched that show. But it is an engine. It is a thing that sort of keeps you going like, well, oh, okay, they did great. Oh, they're doing badly. Oh, okay, well thing, you know, so I found that really an interesting example because it was like, oh, you can sometimes have an engine that isn't why people love the show, but it is actually useful in pressing play on the next episode. So I know that's kind of a non-answer, but I think that's because I don't, don't answer.

Meg: No, it's a great. No's not great answer.

Lorien: It's what's, yeah, go ahead. Sorry.

Meg: It's the plot answer, like it's the answer of the plot of why we come back, what's going to happen. Even though I'm coming back 'cause I love the characters. Right? And it's funny because the show that will remain nameless yesterday and I was like, this engine is so clear and I don't care about any of these people. Right. So, you know, you can go back the other direction too.

Dana: You have to have the other thing. Yeah.

Meg: You have to have both. Okay. One last craft question which is, you know, Wicked is such a wonderful example. Character introductions. We're gonna meet your lead. They're gonna walk on for the first time. How do, what advice are you gonna give emerging writers about character introductions?

Dana: Don't try to do them when you're starting the script. That should be one of the last things you do, because you won't know who the person is fully until you get to the end of the script. So put in something that serves for you know, for a minute. Lives there, placeholder for a minute, and then as you move forward in the script, you're gonna start to really feel who that person is and you're gonna know, okay, that's how you have to meet this person. In order for us to be the most juicy, excited about who this person becomes is we should meet them like this. I never try to do a character introduction at the beginning 'cause I'm like that to me, a character introduction is like when I was asked to write essays about myself to try to get into college, I was like the person who is the least qualified to write an essay about me is me. What are we talking about? I dunno how to do that. I dunno how to do that. So like, I, I would get people to help me. I'd be like, what do you think of me? What do you think I am? You know, like, I don't, it's crazy.

So to me, character introductions, they should be something that emerge way later in the process. And like with, I remember with Elphaba I spent a really, I was like obsessed with that shot of her hand on her hair where she puts her hand behind her head and moves her hair to the side. And everybody kept being like, why are you dying on this weird hill about this hand and this hair? And it was like I felt really strongly that we should see as many pieces of her as possible before we see the green skin. So it was like you see her feet, but they're boots and so her skin's covered down there. You see her bought back, but she's wearing black and so you don't see the skin. You know, it's like, so I wanted to delay the green skin as long as possible, but then also I felt like once we cast Cynthia, I thought it was really important that she was a black woman.

I thought it was really extraordinary that we were allowed to that, that we were encouraged to cast a black woman in this part. I mean, it's incredible. Cynthia's extraordinary. Like once you see her do, you know once we saw her audition tape, it was like, well, everybody's gone like goodbye. Like, 'cause she's just, you can't, she, you know. I Leave Earth when I see her do her thing. I just, I float off of earth it's the best thing in the entire world, I love her so much. But the hand with the hair, I thought it was important to see her hair to be like, this is a black woman because ultimately she's covered in green, but also, she's a black woman. And I just thought that was so wonderful and extraordinary and I just thought like, well that would be great to see that. So it's weird things like that, that for character introductions that tend to like, get stuck in your head that you're like, I just have that hand on that hair. You know, like, I don't know why, but it just felt important by the time we got to the end that that should be the thing. But yeah, I've written 97 versions of character introductions.

Meg: You know, when you said earlier that you say, I'm so good at dialogue, but you think that's my first draft, but it's like my 72nd draft. I'm asking, this is my personal question because I'm in this starting stage, how long do you take to write an official first draft that you're handing into a studio? Are you doing the three month thing? Are you doing all of those drafts in that three month WGA window or?

Dana: You're adorable that you think I know what time is. That you think I understand what a month is. I'm like, WGA, what? Are there rules? Am I supposed to be doing something in a time period? Like I don't even know what that is? I think it depends on every project. Every project is different. If I've written an outline, I can do it within that time period. I can write a script in two months if I've written a really detailed outline.

I can write a bad script in two months. I can, I can write a pretty good script in three or four months. But it all depends on how much pre-work you did before you started writing the script. So if it's like, I've tried to write scripts without outlines. Bye. See you guys in two years. Love you, bye. And also, I was fired. It's over. I didn't ever hand it in 'cause it's 700 years later. I need some kind of map so that I know every day like, oh, right if I did five pages or 10 pages, it would be these or whatever. I also really love writing out of order. I don't know if you do that, but like when you have an outline, you just write what you want that day. Like I'm like I don't really wanna write this today, I'm gonna go write that other thing. And what I've found is almost 90% of the stuff that I avoid writing is because it doesn't need to be in the movie or it's the wrong thing. So if you avoid it long enough, you discover that you do not need to write it. That's why you weren't writing it.

Meg: I love that.

Lorien: I don't need to write the pilot for my pitch is that what you're saying?

Dana: You're fine, you fine. You nailed it. You're done.

Lorien: I don't need that anymore.

Dana: No, who needs that?

Meg: I'm sure there's a scene in there, Lorien, that you do wanna write. You don't have to write the whole thing. Just write that.

Dana: That's exactly right. Write the stuff that makes you happy. And, and Lorien, what you said at the beginning is how I do it, which is like, or maybe it was you, Meg. Oh yeah, it was you. No, both of you. You both said this. You have more than one project going on at once. That is really important to my productivity is that I have more than one thing going at once. I have discovered that like the magic number for me is like three to four things at all times and they have to be in different stages of development. I can't have two scripts that need to be written as screenplays at the same time 'cause I will lose my shit.

If I have an outline in a script, I'm fine. Two different projects, two different stages, no problem. And it really helps me that when I start banging my head against the wall of one of them, I pop over to the other one 'cause I'm like, well this one seems so easy now because I don't have the crazy problems I had on the other thing. Like, this is amazing, like, let's do this one. And I do that one for a while and then I'm like this one's starting to be kind of a problem child. I think I'm gonna leave it alone for a little while and then I go back to the other one and I'm like, this guy who was being an asshole before seems kind of adorable now and then I just type on that guy. And so I, I like to pop around because then I never am not working. Like for me, death is when I like stop and go, oh God, this is so hard what am I gonna do? I keep, I gotta keep typing. If I stop screenwriting for one and a half days, I forget how to do it. Like basically every weekend I forget how to write. Monday morning. I'm like, what do we do first? What happens? How do we type it?

Meg: I feel seen. I feel seen.

Dana: Do you feel seen?

Meg: I'm the same.

Dana: Well, and I want younger writers who are trying to start to know that this feeling doesn't go away. Like I constantly say this to younger people who come to me for mentorship or whatever, and I'm like, you think you're gonna be successful and you're gonna feel like the hole is filled in your heart, or like the big answer to the big question you've had your whole life is coming? It's like it is literally just more of this feeling. It is an elevated version of this feeling. Yes, you're making more money, yay. But like it's a bigger, worse version of this feeling.

Meg: Yes, but a lot more fun.

Dana: But like learn to like, learn to like the feeling because this feeling is not going away. No matter how successful you get, you will still feel like this. You'll still feel like hot trash garbage.

Meg: Okay. I know we, we have to lose you 'cause you have to go onto something else. So we're gonna quickly move to, we ask the same three questions to every guest at the end.

Dana: Oh gosh. These ones scare me. I get nervous. I don't know how to answer.

Meg: No no, they're easy. They're super easy. You're gonna be able to do it super quick. Okay. What brings you the most joy in your writing or about writing?

Dana: My husband always makes fun of me, but sometimes he'll walk past me while I'm writing something and I'll laugh at something that I'm writing and he'll be like, you are laughing at your own joke. And I'm like, no, you don't understand it. I don't think of it as my joke. The character has said something that I have now had to type that really cracks me up, so it's like the character 's made me laugh. That really makes me joyful. And then, yeah, that's, that's my answer.

Lorien: Awesome. What pisses you off about writing?

Dana: Literally everything. All of it, the whole thing. There's not one thing that doesn't piss me off about it. It's so hard. What pisses me off about it is how hard it is to do it well. It's so hard. It's impossible. And then to make it look easy is fucking impossible. And then to succeed at something so once you've done it then people a bunch of people take it and do stuff with it, half the time you're like, what? You did that with the baby? Okay. I mean, give the baby heroin was an option, but it wasn't the one I would've chosen for the baby. So you're just like, okay, I guess, you know? So that, that drives me nuts but I've had the good fortune in the last few years of having directors who are wonderful and actors who are wonderful actually be executing things. And for the first time in my life, like everything I'm writing is coming out better than what I wrote and that is really wonderful. So that I don't hate. That's amazing.

Meg: And the last question is, if you could go back and give advice to your younger self what advice would you give her?

Dana: Aww, my baby self. I think I would say like, take a deep breath, it's gonna be okay. I think I gave myself like a lot of health problems when I was younger 'cause I was so anxious about doing everything, like getting A pluses on everything. I was a victim of perfectionism for a really long time and I had to finally break out of that cycle and learn that like, perfect isn't real that's not a thing. That's a trap. And it's a trap to keeping you from having a big, wonderful life. Perfect is the enemy of done and it gives you a lot of anxiety and don't try to be perfect. That's fake. That's bullshit.

Lorien: There you go. There's the t-shirt.

Dana: Oh, also if you're getting notes, you still have a job. That's the other t-shirt. Notes are great 'cause it means you're not fired.

Meg: I'm taking that, I'm taking that right with me.

Lorien: On our very first episode of the podcast, it was getting notes. And I was going, I, I love getting notes. So we made this notebook that's, I love getting notes and we're gonna send you one.

Dana: Oh, I love it. Thank you.

Lorien: It's a beautiful notebook, but it's like a hardcover, but like for you. It's, I love getting notes.

Dana: It's perfect. And also just to have that on notes calls and be like, hi guys. Like just put it, hold it up to the screen. That's amazing. I love it. Oh, that's awesome. Thank you so much. You guys are amazing.

Meg: Thank you. You're amazing. We're gonna have to have you back because I have so many more questions for your brain.

Dana: I'll come anytime. I love, my the whole thing in life now is trying to help the next generation learn. I wanna give away all my tricks. I want everyone to know everything I know if any of it is helpful to anybody, I want everyone to have it because I think it's our job to help this younger generation come up because the business is not providing them opportunities to learn anything. So we have to do it. We have to ampersand with young kids and get them in the WGA. We have to do everything it takes to teach them any lessons that we have 'cause it's like, there's gonna be no business after this if we don't start training people, you know?

Meg: Okay, well first stop TSL for you first. Stop.

Jeff: We'll talk Dana. That's very exciting.

Dana: You guys are amazing.

Meg: Thank you, thank you!

Jeff: Congrats. Well deserved.

Dana: Thank you so much for everything. Thank you so much, you guys are the best.

Meg: Thanks so much to Dana for being on the show today. What an incredible show. We've already told her she has to come back 'cause we have so many more questions for her big, beautiful brain. And thanks you guys for tuning into The Screenwriting Life. Wicked is available on VOD.

Jeff: And it was just announced on Peacock as well, March 21st. Can't wait.

Lorien: Before I wrap out and say my thing, Meg, what brings you the most joy about writing today?

Meg: I think that right now, today, the joy is gonna be the whispers. I can hear the whispers of the characters and I just need to go and be confident about it and listen.

Lorien: Great. So everybody listen to the whispers and remember, you are not alone and keep writing.