Sunday, August 19, 2012

A 100 storytellers


Just out of a screenwriting workshop. Cost me some time in getting to the place and the five days spent there.
One of the anomalies was that there were a 100 people in the audience, all aspiring writers (90 with some guests). I call this an anomaly because writing is an intensely human journey, and yet the crowd made it impossible for people to connect to each other at a person level. It remained a broadly indistinguishable crowd for me. The very number led to people stick to the cohorts they already knew, which would be the local film schools, or where they naturally belonged (for example, all local women beyond a certain age were seen sitting more or less together from Day 2).
Had it been 10-15 people, in five days we would have ended discovering a lot about each other. But, understandably, these workshops have to break even. And so, I guess it remained a solo journey for most of the people, journeys which were never shared. A girl tried once speaking, or rather spilling, about a man who called her randomly after his wife died and ended up becoming a chat-friend till he died, and immediately no one knew how to handle it, other than move forward to the other question.
Other than that, though the speaker was really knowledgeable and articulate, for me it was more or less a validation for what I already knew and a direction I already see for myself, to go deeper into the study of mythologies.

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