Comfort for comfort

Had what has become my traditional "comfort food" breakfast, scrapple and eggs on milk toast. Comfort breakfast for a mellow, comfortable morning. The key is prep: only a few loose ends to tie and I'm ready for another week of classes. Prep reduces the stress level. Stress is my enemy, and I work diligently to avoid it.

Hope to do some writing this afternoon. Also have chores, out to get the makings for scrapple, so I can make a new batch Wednesday.

I've identified two "natural born screenwriters" in class so far. This is good. Good work is always more fun to read but in the beginning the vast majority haven't yet understood they are not writing novels here. I rewrite their first scenes, get them online, project them on a screen, so the clear rhetorical difference between screenwriting and prose is abundantly clear. Or at least I hope so.

For example:

The difference is quite extraordinary, really, the difference between a literary document and a blueprint for a movie. You can SEE the difference at a glance, which is why many scripts get rejected unread. They don't even look like a spec screenplay.  It takes some students a while to understand this and resist their old verbose writing habits.