Emily Weedon has had many jobs, including scenic/set painter, graphic designer, art director in film and television, screenwriter, musician and band leader, film producer, and book cover designer. Weedon had a speaking role in a feature film, released 3 EPs of original music, wrote and produced a Fringe Festival play, and co-created two seasons of the award-winning web series Chateau Laurier. She’s written several novels, screenplays, and songs, some animated television, and a few stage plays. Autokrator, her first published novel, will be coming out early March 2024.
I met Emily at the 2023 CAFTCAD Awards (The Canadian Alliance for Film and Television Costume Arts and Design). I wanted to know more about her and her work. A few weeks ago, we connected virtually for this interview.
She didn’t know she was going to wind up being a novelist. She hoped for a long time to become a screenwriter. She wrote her first screenplay and play in grade 12. Film school followed, but there was no game plan, just learning about film and soaking up the genre. Autokrator, her upcoming first published novel, happened almost by accident. While living in Hungary with her two-year-old and her ex, she found herself alone most of the time, feeling trapped, not being able to speak the language fluently, and not being able to leave because of being a mother. Out of her experience of being isolated, she started to write. It was “food for her brain.” It was a fluid process and one step after another over the course of 11 years led to getting published, but there was never an “Oh my God, I have to get published” moment.
Weedon thrives on having multiple projects on the go. Her survival tip to anyone who is just getting started is to have multiple projects in multiple genres. She gives the example of a “really great pitch” she and a partner once took to a TV station. The company was looking for anthologies, so she and her partner made an anthology, and went through a rigmarole for almost three and a half years of writing and tweaking, then re tweaking and meetings and then more tweaking. At the very end, they finally took it to that TV station, and they said “It's great. We don't want an anthology”, even though that's exactly what they asked for at that point. That moment when that “no” comes is so hard and so deflating, especially if you put three and a half to five years or more into something. You need to have a product ready to take to market, a product that is still being figured out and a little tiny baby seedling project, and everything in between because at least if they kill your darling, you have other babies to care about. She also finds that different projects inform one another. The more you learn about one thing, the ideas can cross pollinate, keeping your interest piqued and fresh.
With so many projects on the go, I wondered what her days were typically like. She says she used to joke that when she was going to turn 60, she was going to take smoking up again and walk around the apartment wearing mules, smoking and drinking a bottle of Prosecco every day. She would also own a Pomeranian. This has not happened so far so she’s thinking maybe it's not a good idea.
Her days start by waking up without an alarm and letting herself come out of unconsciousness into those “crazy, fun dream thoughts.” Those morning thoughts often lead to her knowing what her next steps for a character are. She’s fiercely protective of her space, choosing to avoiding social media and the news before she hits the computer to write. Negative headlines can be a sandbag, knocking her out for the day. Other ways she protects her time and space include having her child make their own lunches, limiting meetings and socializing, and having a carefully planned calendar. With so much energy and time going into creative output, she fills her well by getting exercise, reading books, trying new experiences, and making dinner every night for herself and her daughter. She loves trying new recipes, and even though cooking can be time consuming, she finds it to be creative and rewarding.
Weedon is inspired more by experiences than she is by people. Though living in Europe with her ex and their child was a dark time with a lot of sadness and difficulty, she says she was “very lucky” and got to travel around a fair bit. Her curiosity was piqued by visiting old buildings and thinking of the historic moments that happened there. She lives in a world of “what ifs.” Something simple like walking into a gas station in Slovakia was creatively stimulating.
Asked about her creative process and how it differs between projects, she says raising children is a good metaphor for her creative process. Every child is different, but every child also needs to be fed and bathed and put to bed. There are signposts that are going to look the same.
For some of the animated projects she worked on, the writing team would get together in a room and break a bunch of stories, then each writer would get their assignment and go off to write their story. Then they check in and its back and forth with the head writer, followed by more notes from people up the chain. What she loves about writing prose is that until she hands the work over to her agent, no one tells her what to do. The process is her own and is mostly about what she likes to call the writer’s inciting incident. In film there is the inciting incident which is the moment when the main character needs to find a magic potion for example and that's the second that that the entire script swings into motion. From that point on that that character is hooked onto that idea and they're going to try to do it and they're going to succeed or fail. She explains the writer’s inciting moment by referencing the 1995 film Seven, where the victim that symbolized the sin of gluttony was discovered. The contents of the victim’s stomach led to a big clue. The writer used the pre-existing structure of the seven deadly sins, but she likes to imagine that the chain of questions about how the contents of the victim’s stomach got there came to them while they were going about their day-to-day activities. She knows she’s hit an inciting incident once these questions start bubbling up. Why did that happen? Why is that there? How did it get there? Why would someone do that? Who is that? She keeps asking those questions until she figures out the answer. After that, the rest of her work is to fill in the blanks and build the structure. She writes chronologically and aims to write two to ten pages a day of prose until the work is complete.
The interview winds down with a discussion about the realities of screenwriting and her additional advice for screenwriting hopefuls. She says that many people view writers and writer-director types as auteurs, people in complete charge of the entire process, calling all the shots, when the reality is that you’re more like a worker on an assembly line. Flexibility, especially working in film, and learning how to pick your battles is key. Actors drop out of projects and scripts must be reworked, shooting locations could fall through, your set could burn down. It’s not uncommon for a producer to want to radically change a story from an initial pitch. She was once working on a show idea about a real family whose child needed and got life changing facial surgery. She pitched it to a producer who asked if she could make the story more about a teenage girl who likes to surf.
Canadian screenwriting hopefuls should know that there is not very much opportunity in Canada especially. It seems like there should be because we all watch TV, we’re all streaming and there’s content everywhere, but the pathway to being the maker of that content is getting more expensive and narrower each day. If she could go back, she says she wouldn’t have gone to film school. Most schools are in the business of taking your money from you to get your bum in their seats so they can say “look how great we are.” Schools are not in the business of making sure that you get a job. She wishes she’d received that advice sooner. Time on set is more valuable than time in a classroom getting ready to hope to get to set.
Screenwriting is one of the most difficult and technical types of writing that there is. She suggests starting by volunteering on a student film to get a sense of what a day on set is like. It's important to be on set to see how they take things apart to put them back together and to understand the technicality of how a screenwriters job goes, because it isn't just about telling a great story. If you find that you don't really like being in a dark rainy field at midnight, and you'd rather be home, it might not be the world for you. If that sounds fun, then keep going. Buy every book you can on screenwriting and take apart every single film you've ever seen and ask yourself, why did I cry just now? Why did I get excited just now? What was happening on screen when I was on the edge of my seat? Figure out what makes movies tick for you and mine that same field.
Visit Emily’s website to stay up to date with her work. https://emilyweedon.com/
Interview by Glodeane Brown
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