My favorite class I ever took here at Agnes was Dramatic Writing II, Intro to Screenwriting. It was incredibly labor intensive and the grading was merciless, but if I could take that class every semester I would.

We were supposed to come in with three movie ideas, and I spent hours laboring over three pitches: A teen adaptation of The Marriage of Figaro, a teen adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew where Petruchio was a trans lesbian, and a romantic comedy wherein a lesbian blackmails her way onto The Bachelor. We submitted the ideas anonymously, but I may as well have written my name all over them. They were very on brand.

The Bachelor idea was far and away the most popular, so I set about working on it. I interviewed past contestants, I cast it in my head, and begun scripting the first half. The work was slow, my professor would hold a ruler up to my script and hand it back if the text was 10.5 cpi (characters per inch).

I wrote 10 pages of script a week. I began to love my characters, Tasha, the headstrong lesbian, Jackie, her love interest who everyone seems to fall for, Gary, the fame-hungry bachelor, even Spatula, Tasha’s cat. They grew with me over the course of the year. As I matured, my characters matured.

Now I’m working on the screenplay as my senior seminar, and I keep falling in love with my work over and over.